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I've been exploring the fediverse and subbing and posting all over the damn place. Realizing lemmy can federate with kbin blew my mind. Not to mention the possibility of turning my old laptop into a personal server to host my own instance. Is this what it felt like to discover how the internet worked in the 90s?
This is the thing that excites me the most about the fediverse. If we can keep it from being monopolized by corporations, it will become a reflection of what the old internet used to be.
I think one of the key things that will prevent the capture of the Fediverse by corporations is never ever allowing whitelists for instance defederation and blocking to happen.
If that ever does happen, it becomes trivially easy to break the decentralized network up into a few centralized silos that are all disconnected from the rest of the network completely, whereas, the way it stands now, you have to explicitly block anyone you don't want to be connected to, so it's a great way to deal with bad actors and nasty instances, but makes it extremely hard to wall off your instance completely, because if you block another instance it's trivially easy for the people that are unhappy with that to find or create a small new instance that flies under the radar and allows them to see the content on both the instance they left and the incense it blocked. It also makes it incredibly hard to capture people on your instance because they can always create a small instance and use that instance to see the content on the instance they left.
I think also limiting block list size for instances (but not users!) Could be a really good way of doing this too because then any instance I want to block a ton of other instances is going to have to fork lemmy to lift that band and then everyone will know they did that and know to get off it.
I agree, but take a small look at email. Email is the way it is currently (basically 3 providers, if you aren't on their specific "good people" list then your emails get nowhere, residential IPs are considered bad by default, a single configuration miss dooms your server forever) because it was hard to maintain an email server, and even harder to combat spam. The fediverse is not immune to spam, but it does have the advantage that there is no expectation of privacy, and thus it is possible to have moderators filter spam. But that's a hard ask. Email became that way because only large corporations were able to write good filters.
I won't argue that there is a possibility that things could go wrong for federated and a decentralized social networks like Lemmy and Mastodon, and we are going to have to fight a cultural and technological battle against that, but I think at least this is a very good start, and I don't think it inherently has to go that way either.