Escaping ruling class and corporate domination is one of the reasons some people choose to migrate to the Fediverse. Even some of the other reasons, like ads, engagement obsession, political censorship, content sorting algorithms, can all be traced back to corporate control.
While corporations don’t have much control of the Fediverse today, could they in the future?
One might think that Fediverse is designed to make this impossible. In my opinion, it is only designed to somewhat resist this, but it is still vulnerable to ruling class takeover. The ruling class doesn’t need that now, as they already control all major social networks, and Fediverse remains a niche. But shall that change, they might be out to try to control it. Can they succeed?
I’ll admit and say I am very far from an expert, so I hope someone will correct me if I make any mistakes due to misunderstanding the Fediverse.
Instead of centralizing a social network in a single instance controlled by a single entity, the Fediverse can be federated into multiple instances. However, to host an instance, requires some investment, and although it can be small for some services, it is a barrier that many people choose not to cross.
Hence, as we have already seen, instances are controlled by either organizations or groups who pooled funds for their instance, or individuals who incurred the initial investment themselves. Not bad, so far. However, this does present an issue. If the Fediverse were to grow more instances, people who have money are more capable of starting new instances. It also favors people who don’t live in countries where salaries and cost of living are lower, which would make renting VPS even more expensive to them. This gap is closed as the software gets better and more lightweight, but as it stands, this is how it works.
The other problem is that many Fediverse networks are already sort of centralized, in the sense that there is one (sometimes a handful) of instances that are biggest. This means If someone were to take over just those, they may already have enough control. This is less of a problem for platforms that matured more and have more instances.
If someone like Elon Musk were to go after the biggest instances and either offer money to buy them (which is very likely to work) or somehow pursue censoring the instances that don’t, although that is not as easy as buying a single company (ignoring the cost difference), it is still quite easy. We haven’t seen it because they haven’t sought it yet, but I fear that the Fediverse is not as resistant to this as it should.
Yes, it can. I’ve posted a lot about that over time. There’s a kind of complacency that “we’ve made it” but in reality the fediverse is incredibly fragile. Now I advocate mostly on the development / technology side of things. The fediverse with its 3-5 million fedizens is supported on software side by 100-200 active developers. The average project has a single developer. Mastodon has 2 maintainers. That is an incredibly tiny base. One small corporate jumping on the hype train basically. I sometimes say that fediverse manages to be interesting… for exploitation. But not strong to withstand a corporate onslaught.
Things get worse when we look at the evolution of the (technical) ecosystem as a whole. After the open interoperability standards became final, they didn’t evolve any further. Extensions were made mostly on individual app level and not made readilly accessible to others. New app developers have a very hard time onboarding and integrating with other apps involves reverse-engineering from code bases on an app-by-app basis. Overall interoperability deteriorates over time, if there’s not more collaborative attention for fedi’s ecosystem evolution.
The potential of the Fediverse is much bigger than what we have now. Currently Microblogging dominates. But there are so many different app types that have social aspects that could lend themselves to be federated. If that would happen and integrations between different app types become more seamless and deeper, a real “social fabric” would appear that walled garden corporates would find hard to compete with. In that situation the fediverse as a whole will start generating its own network effects. If have - for me personally - defined a vision of the Peopleverse for the fedi future, which is more social-oriented, than the current tech-oriented fediverse. Fediverse (technical) --> Peopleverse (social).
Of course after a corporate takeover there will always be a niche where the ‘old fedi’ can still be found, just like on the corporate web you can still find delightful personal blogs, bulletin boards. But it won’t be the same, and it will likely be harder to find. If Twitter would embrace ActivityPub - what many fedizens hope for - then fediverse will be sorely disrupted, I am afraid.
PS. I wrote more on this in Fediverse Futures community, and recently took some notes on fixing the technology adoption lifecycle and having a shared technology vision.
@[email protected] hit the nail on the head, that the biggest danger is convincing current fediverse devs to sell out, which due to our small number, and tiny amount of current funding ( most of us get less funding than youtubers ), would be incredibly easy.
Throw a few fediverse devs some high salaries or payoffs, and you could easily tank the fediverse.
The only way to fight this, and to grow the fediverse, is provide more open funding so that we can add more developers and grow these projects.
