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.
This is not answering my question, or we have different ideas of what it means to dominate.
80% of email traffic is either Gmail or Outlook, yet none of Big Tech is able to control it fully. They can not force you to use their email server, and smaller providers still exist and are actually healthy business.
Is it hard to run an email by yourself? Yes. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. To me, that is what matters.
Then yes indeed were thinking differently. To me, email has already lost to big tech. The technical possibility of hosting email is there, but you can’t even reach most users of the world without a lot of work.
