If not completely destroy it, at least make it irrelevant for those who want to avoid it.
The FOSS movement never destroyed Microsoft, but it arguably made it possible for us to live in a world where Bill Gates owned every PC software that we run.
In my opinion, the fediverse as it exists today is very vulnerable to domination by big tech. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is it is too small for them to care that much.
If the fediverse ever becomes mainstream, big tech will dominate it. If we want to fight big tech, we need to rethink our strategy and the fediverse, because right now, the fediverse is not ready to take it on.
How would that happen? If the core idea of “the Fediverse” is to have a loosely-connected network of servers and applications speaking a common protocol, how is it that they would use to “dominate” it?
I am not saying that Big Tech couldn’t try to use it “open wash” their solutions, like Facebook and Google did with XMPP before. But what I am saying is that (like XMPP) I think it’s virtually impossible for them to “dominate” something that is open.
I’m also not saying that the software we have is ready for the masses (it isn’t) but all the issues I see are just a matter of implementation, not a fundamental design flaw.
There’s several vulnerabilities:
- the fediverse unfortunately remains quite centralized. Most users wanna join the big servers. If it wasn’t for the big servers literally driving people away, we would’ve been even more centralized
- most people have no issue with corporate presence in the fediverse. They’re okay with blue sky and okay with threads. In fact, clearly Gargaron is okay with meta and threads.
- big tech already has a federated server that dwarves the rest of the fediverse combined: threads. Yes it’s still not quite there yet, but if they complete its federation, they will dominate it.
- gargaron showed he’s okay selling out to Meta. What prevents another instance admin? A corporation could easily offer enough money to a handful of instance admins and control all these instances.
