this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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Another “governance” think tank has its eye on the fediverse (infrastructureinsights.fund)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Three months ago I posted about the Atlantic Council’s interest in the controlling the fediverse: https://lemmy.ml/post/6641106

I think these projects are the continuation of the successful American “intelligence community” censorship of corporate social media platforms. They even tried to formalize the system two years ago as the Disinformation Governance Board.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

This Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.

Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps "whatever Mastodon is doing". That's problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.

I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That's fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing. They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think Mastodon is already compromised

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

I think throwing around vague but scary-sounding terms like "compromised" is a very bad idea.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

There's a difference between 'governance' and 'control'. And I really doubt Erin Kissane of all people is involved in efforts to control the fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, good luck with that. Controlled given instances might be achievable, but the protocol will eventually route around the damage.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I think that is engineer’s disease thinking.

Running instances costs money & labor, and I predict that many instance admins will be happy to accept various forms of assistance, and the CIA/FBI/etc-backed organizations will be happy to help. The assistance might be just money, which comes with strings attached such as simply having the ear of the admins. The assistance might be “moderation tools,” to save labor efforts.

I think the instances that choose to federate with corporate social media (which are already captured by feds) will probably be the easiest to gain control of. If you’ve been following the corpo federation discourse, you might have noticed that the instances with the largest user bases tend to be the most interested in federating with the corpo social media.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

so you agree the only instances that can be compromised are ones that choooose to do so.

i think most of what you wrote here is wrong, and i have about as much to back it up as you do.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The ones that don’t choose to may eventually find themselves defederated from the ones that do. We’ll get walled off from the large instances that “play ball”.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

uh huh. k. cool story. let me know if you ever get anything to actually back up that claim.

let me rephrase.. your conjecture is unfounded, and hyperbolic.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

RemindMe! 4 years "federation is going great"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

see; proof you have nothing but hopes and dreams. just like me!

ha '''you just wait, in 4 years i may be right!' hilarious