A “51% attack” isn’t really meaningful for something like the Fediverse because there’s no concept of any particular instance or group of instances being “authoritative.” There’s no special benefit to be had from owning a majority of the instances or users or whatever other metric you want to measure by.
If tomorrow Reddit were to magically federate, it would instantly have the majority of threaded conversation going on in the Fediverse under its control. If the day afterward it defederated again, it wouldn’t mean that it had somehow “become” the Fediverse and the rest of us were being shed like irrelevant detritus. It’s nothing at all like a cryptocurrency fork, where there’s a strong incentive to follow whatever the “majority” fork is doing because that’s where the money is.
Good writeup, but I don’t see the Fediverse as a single entity–if a single instance gets to 51%, and even 25% of the other instances fork and continue federating among themselves, then those 25% would function just as well, and likely maintain users with shared interests (i.e. how Lemmy is still interesting despite being much smaller than Reddit)
I don’t get how once to federation starts those instances go extinct. They still federate with instances who federate with the corp but just not the corp.
I don’t think it’s quite right to call this a “51% attack”. That applies more to cryptocurrency networks, or networks built on consensus.
If a single Lemmy instance gained 51% market share, they’d have almost as much to lose as the rest of the fediverse by defederating. There’s really no magic number here.
It’s also based more on communities than on users. It’s easy for a user to move. It’s very difficult for a whole community to move.
I think the most important thing in the fediverse is to actively encourage communities to distribute themselves somewhat evenly across instances. It won’t matter if Meta has 90% of users if those users are largely interacting with federated communities. Then if Meta pulled the plug, those users would be motivated to pick up and move to an instance that didn’t block their favorite communities.
It’s great, for example, that we have specialized instances like startrek.website. Ideally, everyone on Lemmy should be “invested” in multiple instances, to the point that federation is essential for the service to remain useful to them on an individual level.
I think the fediverse needs something akin to antitrust laws that encourage and perhaps even enforce competition. I’m not sure how this could actually work though.
Already, I think the largest Lemmy instances are big enough to threaten the health of the network. Shop local and support small instances!
But while that’s a very lucky thing to have, the issue is that we depend on the owner of Mastodon to not sell the company to a billionaire.
We don’t depend on that. Buying Mastodon would get them the branding but not Mastodon itself. It’s all GPL/AGPL and would be forked immediately if sold. The buyer would have no control over it.
Oracle may have owned OpenOffice but it didn’t matter. Everyone uses LibreOffice now. Same shit.
Dont agree here, the https://joinmastodon.org/ already redirects users to make an account there. Even if its FOSS the company that represents it is very powerful. Think of android, technically FOSS but Google can control preety much all of its developments. No forks would be even be considered
First, Mastodon isn’t a platform, it’s a service. Unlike Mastodon, Android was always a bunch of proprietary stuff built onto an open source base. The Android license (Apache) is also a lot more permissive than Mastodon’s (GPL). Probably the most important thing here is that all derivative works must be licensed under the GPL, whereas Google can use AOSP code to build out proprietary features whenever they want.
Their ability to use the app to direct users to mastodon.social depends entirely on Mastodon’s good reputation. Destroying the reputation destroys the ability along with it. Mastodon is way bigger than just m.s, but a buyer wouldn’t control the instance in a meaningful enough sense. Users aren’t serfs and there would be a mass exodus if, say, Peter Thiel bought Mastodon. Some would stay, but the people who contribute probably 90% of the activity would be out the door. Very likely, users would be given time to migrate before the larger community defederated the instance en masse. Any effort to prevent users from leaving would just accelerate that process. They just have no real ability to compel people to behave the way they want.
To be fair, mastodon.social is Mastodon instance, and all Mastodon instances (that support signup at all) will show a Sign Up link for themselves. This is true from the biggest instances to the smallest ones.
But to bolster your point, the Mastodon app could push exclusively for signups on the newly acquired mastodon.social domain, and hide other options behind a dark pattern… Like how Element does this when you try to log in to a Matrix server.
Yeah sorry, meant https://joinmastodon.org instead of .social
