You must log in or register to comment.
While it’s DEFINITELY not a bad idea to not put all eggs in one basket and prevent stuff from even happening in the first place, i think this person is worrying too much about the consequences. We do have a recent important precedent of a very public corporate takeover of a very popular free software service: The Freenode IRC takeover. After the nutcase effectively took over the network’s ownership, people just… left. They remade the service elsewhere (Libera.Chat) and everybody moved, making the takeover meaningless. So, if worst comes to worst i don’t think there’s gonna be a problem. Here’s the info on Wikipedia of the event and the exodus to Libera Chat
It’s not that simple. ActivityPub is at risk of centralization, just like email. There are no built-in protections against centralization or EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Furthermore, Mastodon makes it difficult to migrate accounts, especially from an instance that is unreachable or just disabled the export function.
Unfortunately locking users into a platform is extremely valuable because they can be shown ads, used for data mining, manipulation (like Cambridge Analytica). ActivityPub is not automatically immune to all of this.
The comparison with IRC is not very meaningful: moving from one server to another is much easier because IRC users don’t lose followers, bookmarks, posts, etc.
How would a “built-in protection against centralization” even work?
IMHO, you can only provide tools. You can’t prevent people from being stupid and not using them. That’s also why by now, e.g. the EU tries to solve such problems through regulation.
The protocol could require “dual-homing” user accounts, where each account is automatically replicated on 2 different instances without need for hacks and workarounds. That would prevent users from losing their account if an instance is shut down, and also make it easy to migrate to a new instance without losing followers etc. The clients following your account always check for updates on both instances and if you move one of your accounts they update automatically.
(This would not create significant additional load on the network: your toots are already being replicated on all instances where you have followers.)
IMHO, you can only provide tools
No, tools are rarely “neutral”. They encourage or discourage workflows and behaviors.
The protocol could require “dual-homing” user accounts, where each account is automatically replicated on 2 different instances without need for hacks and workarounds. That would prevent users from losing their account if an instance is shut down, and also make it easy to migrate to a new instance without losing followers etc. The clients following your account always check for updates on both instances and if you move one of your accounts they update automatically.
Sounds like Nomadic identity from the Hubzilla and Streams projects.
mstdn.social concentration is looking similar to matrix.org, so, what about Matrix then?
They aren’t worried about matrix because ever since Musk bought Twitter people have suddenly started caring about mastodon and activitypub. Not that I agree with the toot but the assumption is that corporate actors can use this scenario and mastodon to jumpstart their twitter alternative or something like that. Because of this mastodon has been getting a lot of attention. People don’t care about matrix yet.
@ksynwa I think Matrix has more users (~64 million) than the Fediverse (~13 million).
Wow I didn’t know that. Thanks.
Matrix also has incredible moderation abilities if you configure proper bots, and is very Discord like with guilds, plus no 8 MB media upload limit nonsense. But there is bloat as well compared to XMPP.
