How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.
Interesting, it was a variation of embrace, extend, extinguish, without the extend part.
In a way, I think it happened to the entire internet. Look at browsers today, web development (that one might be controversial, but I think big techs somewhat forced bloated frameworks to be the standard way to create websites), video streaming, etc.
No, extend is a major part of it. That’s how they topple community projects. They extend in good faith at first to get everyone locked in, then they extend in nefarious ways to keep the community stuck playing catch-up. Once they’ve absorbed all the users from the community projects, they kill off back access leaving the community project crippled in users and lost in direction.
Trust me. Facebook will definitely add great things at first but their goal is to draw users out of the fediverse and into Facebook.
I sure hope that Meta doesn’t try to integrate ActivityPub into their apps. As a user that feels like they finally found their home (Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy/kbin), please, go away Meta. lol
Should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants this to succeed. I hope we don’t make the same mistakes as doomed so many other open source open protocol projects in the past.
They will likely offer the one thing we are missing here-
Ease of use, for normal people. Ie, your grandma using her facebook app, can interact with you via the fediverse.
That being said- most of us will know, the temporary boost to the fediverse will not be worth the long-term consequences. But- to your average user, they will love this idea.
So- only time will tell. Although, Mastodon has quite a following and has been holding steady so far.
It baffles me that so many don’t see it for what it is.
Meta contacts their competitor, and says that they want to build a competing product, and want us as competitor to help them with that. How can you possibly fall for that. Meta can already use activitypub for whatever they are building without any need to contact anyone from the Fediverse. The only possible reason they contact instance admins is because Meta wants to dictate the terms on how to Fediverse operates.
I sorta wish we could subscribe to federation endpoints the way we do to magazines. Then it won’t matter what is being federated overall. Hail the user, hail thyself!
The Fediverse is bound to come to the attention of big corporations, and if it becomes big enough they will view it as competition and try to crush it. I doubt it can outcompete them in terms of popularity. The best hope has to be coexistence, in which the Fediverse doesn’t try to win the most users, but defends its integrity against large corporations entering the space to sabotage it.
The comparison with XMPP may not be conclusive: XMPP is purely a communication protocol, so if not many people use it, not many people can be reached through it and it becomes less useful. Something like Lemmy, by contrast, is not intended to get you in touch with everyone in the world. It can function as long as it has enough users to make it interesting, enough money to pay for servers, and enough skilled developers willing to work on it. It doesn’t need huge numbers of users, and it doesn’t need to outcompete Reddit or any other corporate platform.
I hope Lemmy can equip itself with good tools for managing trolls and other kinds of attack, including corporate-led sabotage, because those things are likely to come soon. There has been an explosion in bot accounts recently, which are ominously dormant for the time being. If those all get switched on at once, there will be a huge amount of noise and a big increase in traffic. Lemmy needs to prioritize equipping itself to withstand this.
But if Meta enters the space and siphons off a bunch of users, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t continue here as before, without it. It may be a relatively small community but it can still function.
there’s no reason the rest of us can’t continue here as before, without it.
That’s OP’s point. They won’t just siphon users. They will profit off of our content, while providing nothing in return, and intentionally breaking things to ensure the network never grows larger than a certain amount.
Offers for help should be treated the same as offers from a country you are actively at war with. No instances should federate with any Meta own/operated/controlled system. To do otherwise is suicide for the fediverse.
We should also avoid building on technologies they control. Even if OSS, they can knowingly introduce bugs in updates that only break fediverse tech and not meta tech. Which is exactly what the examples in the posted article did. Microsoft did exactly this, to ensure dominance in document file formats.
It seems really stupid from our perspective. Maliciously petty, but our paychecks don’t depend on the success of the fediverse, while theirs does depend on it’s failure.
These are not compatible communities, due to the owners of one.
But if Meta enters the space and siphons off a bunch of users, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t continue here as before, without it. It may be a relatively small community but it can still function.
It could lead to fracturing. If, for example, different forks of the software showed it with varying degrees of giving into Metas direction, that could fracture the community. Or simply the question of how to cope with the new imbalance.
You cant have a curve ball being thrown into traffic and expect your car comes out fine just because you are closing your eyes.
Have you actually read the article? That is literally how it first started for XMPP.
And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
And once google separated completely,
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
I think the best outcome is for Fediverse to succeed at proving the model is better for users than mega corps. Then grow and last long enough until the EU takes notice, such that if any bad actors try to ruin it they’d want to protect it. We’re probably talking far into the future, but I think if handled well it can get to that point.
If the Fediverse takes off, it would be fair to expect that new mega corps would arise out of that success. At one point, Reddit was a scrappy startup. Before that, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft were small companies that were going to change the world. Who knows which high user, high uptime instances will end up requiring full time staff, or which software tools will be used for interfacing with the Fediverse (or analyzing stats within the Fediverse), or otherwise make a profit out of all the activity that would be going on here?
Yes, and if it becomes really big, then every federated instance would find itself coping with large amounts of traffic passed to and from the big instances, and it will become difficult to run a small operation cheaply. At that point, only the big players with big money will be able to run sites in the Fediverse and it could end up mirroring what has happened to the rest of the internet.
On balance I think it’s best if existing Fediverse instances don’t federate with the big corporations. But there are still other ways the corporations could sabotage this place, so the developers and the site admins need to be ready.
if it becomes really big, then every federated instance would find itself coping with large amounts of traffic passed to and from the big instances, and it will become difficult to run a small operation cheaply
I think that’ where the biggest threat lies. How is a small operator going to keep up with the demands of a corporate server cluster with millions of users. A small operator would have to defederate. That puts us back to the crux of the original question, should corpos be allowed on the Fediverse. Why not save everyone the circle jerk and blacklist them from the start.
A secondary threat is corporate sabotage of the ActivityPub protocol. They already have a track record of doing that to free and open standards.
I wouldn’t assume the EU would necessarily be interested in protecting the Fediverse. Legislation like the GDPR is very much oriented towards working with corporate entities and the open Fediverse model is generally at odds with the right to be forgotten (since it’s effectively impossible to ensure all copies of a user’s data are deleted - I don’t even think it’s possible to determine which nodes may have a copy of a year old post).
I assume the parent commenter referred to the EU because they seem to be the only governing body on the planet with enough influence and an actual desire to actually stand up to major corporations. The US sure ain’t going to be doing it, and the list of other options is essentially zero, so that’s the only hope we have in terms of legal protections or regulations.
Couldn’t the protocol be updated to be more compliant with the right to be forgotten? Something like, when a user deletes a comment it gets deleted from the DB of every federated instance. Sure enough, admins might have made backups and that would theoretically go against the GDPR but still… you can only apply these laws to a certain extent. It’s the same as you posting a picture on Facebook, me downloading it and you deleting it afterwards. Even if you were to make a GDPR request to Meta you still couldn’t get the picture on my PC. But that’s not Meta’s fault, they can’t do much about that.
We just need Wikipedia style funding. If the server publishes their costs and fundraises, then people can support it directly. Instead of the stick and carrot of subscriptions or the rat race of ads, just be open and honest about server needs. If the users aren’t able to raise funds, then cut back to what’s affordable. Users will either deal with the reduced server capacity or they’ll need to pay up to continue enjoying it. This doesn’t need to be a free ride, but I trust the community will rally for a good service.
A lot of server owners do this already. The instance I’m on for example does this and also disclosed that they would donate any “proceeds” to the development of Lemmy. So they are only paying for upkeep costs.
This made me wonder - what happens if my chosen Lemmy server goes down? Do I lose my account?
Hopefully, some kind of account portability is possible or in consideration. Even if it’s a manual download of settings and subscriptions that could easily be uploaded to another instance.
As of right now, yes your account would go poof. Mastodon currently has a way to migrate servers, but it hasn’t been implemented in Lemmy yet. I’m sure at some point it will become available, but if you are worried about all your posts I’d make local backups for now.
Thanks. I’m not really worried about my comments, nothing I’m saying is that useful long term. It’s more the list of subscriptions, that would be a headache to recreate.
That’s not going to work for web hosting. The only reason it works for crypto or folding is because each request takes minutes to run and there’s no time dependence on returning the result. Additionally, they don’t need much data and all data needed is dispersed with the task.
Websites are completely different. Each individual request is tiny, taking milliseconds to process. Each request is very time dependant, you have a person literally waiting for the result. But the biggest issue is that what people really want is stuff from a database. So that database would need up grant full access to everyone, meaning anyone could change whatever they wanted. Lastly, that database would need to be hosted anyway so you’ve gained nothing.
Don’t suggest tech solutions when you don’t have any idea what the problem or solution actually involves.
doesn’t have to be blockchain based, but there should be some sort of incentive for people to take up the burden of hosting (and moderating, I guess) like blockchains have for people to run nodes, or instances will start shutting down eventually when the people who were footing the bill get tired of it. Or maybe I’m wrong and instances will survive on donations and goodwill of their moderators. I’m not sure how that’d work if communities get really big though
Think less “Bitcoin” and more “Freenet.” IMO the point shouldn’t be to try to monetize stuff, it should be to decouple content from the instance it was posted on (i.e., to mirror popular content across instances to distribute the load) while still maintaining control and attribution for the user that posted it.
Amen. When people talk about how Reddit or Twitter will always be bigger, I say, “Let them be bigger.” What we have out here is fantastic just the way it is. In a global world, “small” is still millions of people.
But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.
This above is, I think, a very important attitude that is all too often thrown aside in the search for success. So many have dreamed of the “year of the Linux desktop,” but I have never shared that desire; and it is largely for fear of what is being referenced above. I like those peculiar freedoms of Linux and other open source software projects. If it, or other such projects, were to take a truly significant market share I feel it would almost certainly start becoming what it opposed. I want the freedom and the honesty of such projects to remain, even if (possibly because?) they are somewhat niche, geeky and not entirely newbie friendly.
Maybe I’m bitter, and I know a lot of people wouldn’t agree with this, but honestly? I think the non-corporate part of the Fediverse should just assume malice from the get go and preemptively defederate from whatever Meta put out. That way nothing’s changed - Meta would essentially have a private / proprietary / isolated network, as far as users are concerned (much like Facebook already is), and even if the Fediverse will see less growth in the short term because of that, there will be no confusion on where everybody stands.
I hope the Fediverse chooses not to play the larger corpos game and minimizes their influence at all stages. I forget where I saw it posted but just like linux, the Fediverse doesn’t need to rush success. It will be successful, because what large corporations offer as social media is dreadful. Sooner or later all of them force some form of poison pill through their platform. Your content doesn’t need to be commodified into product. No one owns your content and no one should be able to push content/ ads on you that you do not approve of. We may need to pay a little something for this freedom, and that’s cool. Free as in freedom & not as in beer. Long live the fediverse or what ever currently holds to those values.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Interesting, it was a variation of embrace, extend, extinguish, without the extend part.
In a way, I think it happened to the entire internet. Look at browsers today, web development (that one might be controversial, but I think big techs somewhat forced bloated frameworks to be the standard way to create websites), video streaming, etc.
No, extend is a major part of it. That’s how they topple community projects. They extend in good faith at first to get everyone locked in, then they extend in nefarious ways to keep the community stuck playing catch-up. Once they’ve absorbed all the users from the community projects, they kill off back access leaving the community project crippled in users and lost in direction.
Trust me. Facebook will definitely add great things at first but their goal is to draw users out of the fediverse and into Facebook.
I sure hope that Meta doesn’t try to integrate ActivityPub into their apps. As a user that feels like they finally found their home (Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy/kbin), please, go away Meta. lol
Should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants this to succeed. I hope we don’t make the same mistakes as doomed so many other open source open protocol projects in the past.
The solution is to simply ignore the corpos
I envision- its not that simple.
They will likely offer the one thing we are missing here-
Ease of use, for normal people. Ie, your grandma using her facebook app, can interact with you via the fediverse.
That being said- most of us will know, the temporary boost to the fediverse will not be worth the long-term consequences. But- to your average user, they will love this idea.
So- only time will tell. Although, Mastodon has quite a following and has been holding steady so far.
It doesn’t matter what they offer, whatever it is or however nice, it’s a trojan horse.
It is not in our or the fediverse’s interest to cede any form of control to these corporations who have a monetary interest in ensuring our failure
Great Article. Meta brings nothing I want to ever see. Dont federate with them.
It baffles me that so many don’t see it for what it is.
Meta contacts their competitor, and says that they want to build a competing product, and want us as competitor to help them with that. How can you possibly fall for that. Meta can already use activitypub for whatever they are building without any need to contact anyone from the Fediverse. The only possible reason they contact instance admins is because Meta wants to dictate the terms on how to Fediverse operates.
I’m not on Facebook for a reason, I will never fed with meta.
I sorta wish we could subscribe to federation endpoints the way we do to magazines. Then it won’t matter what is being federated overall. Hail the user, hail thyself!
I need to spend some time playing with KBin I like the bit I was testing but being able to share wtih Lemmy is so awesome.
That should be in the FAQ
I’d rather federate with Google plus. I need to get back in touch with my old circles. ;)
The Fediverse is bound to come to the attention of big corporations, and if it becomes big enough they will view it as competition and try to crush it. I doubt it can outcompete them in terms of popularity. The best hope has to be coexistence, in which the Fediverse doesn’t try to win the most users, but defends its integrity against large corporations entering the space to sabotage it.
The comparison with XMPP may not be conclusive: XMPP is purely a communication protocol, so if not many people use it, not many people can be reached through it and it becomes less useful. Something like Lemmy, by contrast, is not intended to get you in touch with everyone in the world. It can function as long as it has enough users to make it interesting, enough money to pay for servers, and enough skilled developers willing to work on it. It doesn’t need huge numbers of users, and it doesn’t need to outcompete Reddit or any other corporate platform.
I hope Lemmy can equip itself with good tools for managing trolls and other kinds of attack, including corporate-led sabotage, because those things are likely to come soon. There has been an explosion in bot accounts recently, which are ominously dormant for the time being. If those all get switched on at once, there will be a huge amount of noise and a big increase in traffic. Lemmy needs to prioritize equipping itself to withstand this.
But if Meta enters the space and siphons off a bunch of users, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t continue here as before, without it. It may be a relatively small community but it can still function.
That’s OP’s point. They won’t just siphon users. They will profit off of our content, while providing nothing in return, and intentionally breaking things to ensure the network never grows larger than a certain amount.
Offers for help should be treated the same as offers from a country you are actively at war with. No instances should federate with any Meta own/operated/controlled system. To do otherwise is suicide for the fediverse.
We should also avoid building on technologies they control. Even if OSS, they can knowingly introduce bugs in updates that only break fediverse tech and not meta tech. Which is exactly what the examples in the posted article did. Microsoft did exactly this, to ensure dominance in document file formats.
It seems really stupid from our perspective. Maliciously petty, but our paychecks don’t depend on the success of the fediverse, while theirs does depend on it’s failure.
These are not compatible communities, due to the owners of one.
It could lead to fracturing. If, for example, different forks of the software showed it with varying degrees of giving into Metas direction, that could fracture the community. Or simply the question of how to cope with the new imbalance.
You cant have a curve ball being thrown into traffic and expect your car comes out fine just because you are closing your eyes.
But fracturing is not necessarily a death sentence. I don’t necessarily want a billion users part of my echo chamber.
Have you actually read the article? That is literally how it first started for XMPP.
And once google separated completely,
I think the best outcome is for Fediverse to succeed at proving the model is better for users than mega corps. Then grow and last long enough until the EU takes notice, such that if any bad actors try to ruin it they’d want to protect it. We’re probably talking far into the future, but I think if handled well it can get to that point.
If the Fediverse takes off, it would be fair to expect that new mega corps would arise out of that success. At one point, Reddit was a scrappy startup. Before that, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft were small companies that were going to change the world. Who knows which high user, high uptime instances will end up requiring full time staff, or which software tools will be used for interfacing with the Fediverse (or analyzing stats within the Fediverse), or otherwise make a profit out of all the activity that would be going on here?
Yes, and if it becomes really big, then every federated instance would find itself coping with large amounts of traffic passed to and from the big instances, and it will become difficult to run a small operation cheaply. At that point, only the big players with big money will be able to run sites in the Fediverse and it could end up mirroring what has happened to the rest of the internet.
On balance I think it’s best if existing Fediverse instances don’t federate with the big corporations. But there are still other ways the corporations could sabotage this place, so the developers and the site admins need to be ready.
I think that’ where the biggest threat lies. How is a small operator going to keep up with the demands of a corporate server cluster with millions of users. A small operator would have to defederate. That puts us back to the crux of the original question, should corpos be allowed on the Fediverse. Why not save everyone the circle jerk and blacklist them from the start.
A secondary threat is corporate sabotage of the ActivityPub protocol. They already have a track record of doing that to free and open standards.
I wouldn’t assume the EU would necessarily be interested in protecting the Fediverse. Legislation like the GDPR is very much oriented towards working with corporate entities and the open Fediverse model is generally at odds with the right to be forgotten (since it’s effectively impossible to ensure all copies of a user’s data are deleted - I don’t even think it’s possible to determine which nodes may have a copy of a year old post).
I assume the parent commenter referred to the EU because they seem to be the only governing body on the planet with enough influence and an actual desire to actually stand up to major corporations. The US sure ain’t going to be doing it, and the list of other options is essentially zero, so that’s the only hope we have in terms of legal protections or regulations.
Couldn’t the protocol be updated to be more compliant with the right to be forgotten? Something like, when a user deletes a comment it gets deleted from the DB of every federated instance. Sure enough, admins might have made backups and that would theoretically go against the GDPR but still… you can only apply these laws to a certain extent. It’s the same as you posting a picture on Facebook, me downloading it and you deleting it afterwards. Even if you were to make a GDPR request to Meta you still couldn’t get the picture on my PC. But that’s not Meta’s fault, they can’t do much about that.
The biggest issue is who pays for the server infrastructure at scale.
We just need Wikipedia style funding. If the server publishes their costs and fundraises, then people can support it directly. Instead of the stick and carrot of subscriptions or the rat race of ads, just be open and honest about server needs. If the users aren’t able to raise funds, then cut back to what’s affordable. Users will either deal with the reduced server capacity or they’ll need to pay up to continue enjoying it. This doesn’t need to be a free ride, but I trust the community will rally for a good service.
A lot of server owners do this already. The instance I’m on for example does this and also disclosed that they would donate any “proceeds” to the development of Lemmy. So they are only paying for upkeep costs.
This made me wonder - what happens if my chosen Lemmy server goes down? Do I lose my account?
Hopefully, some kind of account portability is possible or in consideration. Even if it’s a manual download of settings and subscriptions that could easily be uploaded to another instance.
As of right now, yes your account would go poof. Mastodon currently has a way to migrate servers, but it hasn’t been implemented in Lemmy yet. I’m sure at some point it will become available, but if you are worried about all your posts I’d make local backups for now.
Thanks. I’m not really worried about my comments, nothing I’m saying is that useful long term. It’s more the list of subscriptions, that would be a headache to recreate.
Agreed that would be a huge pain.
The Fediverse seems like a good place to implement a distributed, block chain based peering setup. Join a community and share the hosting
That’s not going to work for web hosting. The only reason it works for crypto or folding is because each request takes minutes to run and there’s no time dependence on returning the result. Additionally, they don’t need much data and all data needed is dispersed with the task.
Websites are completely different. Each individual request is tiny, taking milliseconds to process. Each request is very time dependant, you have a person literally waiting for the result. But the biggest issue is that what people really want is stuff from a database. So that database would need up grant full access to everyone, meaning anyone could change whatever they wanted. Lastly, that database would need to be hosted anyway so you’ve gained nothing.
Don’t suggest tech solutions when you don’t have any idea what the problem or solution actually involves.
At a simple level- a lot of that happens already.
Moving around between communities is quite seamless, even though most of them are hosted on different servers, and even different parts of the world.
OMG why do tech bros try to force blockchain into everything
doesn’t have to be blockchain based, but there should be some sort of incentive for people to take up the burden of hosting (and moderating, I guess) like blockchains have for people to run nodes, or instances will start shutting down eventually when the people who were footing the bill get tired of it. Or maybe I’m wrong and instances will survive on donations and goodwill of their moderators. I’m not sure how that’d work if communities get really big though
Think less “Bitcoin” and more “Freenet.” IMO the point shouldn’t be to try to monetize stuff, it should be to decouple content from the instance it was posted on (i.e., to mirror popular content across instances to distribute the load) while still maintaining control and attribution for the user that posted it.
it’s better to have a small place with nice people rather than a big place full of bad people
Amen. When people talk about how Reddit or Twitter will always be bigger, I say, “Let them be bigger.” What we have out here is fantastic just the way it is. In a global world, “small” is still millions of people.
This above is, I think, a very important attitude that is all too often thrown aside in the search for success. So many have dreamed of the “year of the Linux desktop,” but I have never shared that desire; and it is largely for fear of what is being referenced above. I like those peculiar freedoms of Linux and other open source software projects. If it, or other such projects, were to take a truly significant market share I feel it would almost certainly start becoming what it opposed. I want the freedom and the honesty of such projects to remain, even if (possibly because?) they are somewhat niche, geeky and not entirely newbie friendly.
Maybe I’m bitter, and I know a lot of people wouldn’t agree with this, but honestly? I think the non-corporate part of the Fediverse should just assume malice from the get go and preemptively defederate from whatever Meta put out. That way nothing’s changed - Meta would essentially have a private / proprietary / isolated network, as far as users are concerned (much like Facebook already is), and even if the Fediverse will see less growth in the short term because of that, there will be no confusion on where everybody stands.
I hope the Fediverse chooses not to play the larger corpos game and minimizes their influence at all stages. I forget where I saw it posted but just like linux, the Fediverse doesn’t need to rush success. It will be successful, because what large corporations offer as social media is dreadful. Sooner or later all of them force some form of poison pill through their platform. Your content doesn’t need to be commodified into product. No one owns your content and no one should be able to push content/ ads on you that you do not approve of. We may need to pay a little something for this freedom, and that’s cool. Free as in freedom & not as in beer. Long live the fediverse or what ever currently holds to those values.
Sure, and 2023 will finally be the year of Linux Desktop.