But while that’s a very lucky thing to have, the issue is that we depend on the owner of Mastodon to not sell the company to a billionaire.
We don’t depend on that. Buying Mastodon would get them the branding but not Mastodon itself. It’s all GPL/AGPL and would be forked immediately if sold. The buyer would have no control over it.
Oracle may have owned OpenOffice but it didn’t matter. Everyone uses LibreOffice now. Same shit.
A “51% attack” isn’t really meaningful for something like the Fediverse because there’s no concept of any particular instance or group of instances being “authoritative.” There’s no special benefit to be had from owning a majority of the instances or users or whatever other metric you want to measure by.
If tomorrow Reddit were to magically federate, it would instantly have the majority of threaded conversation going on in the Fediverse under its control. If the day afterward it defederated again, it wouldn’t mean that it had somehow “become” the Fediverse and the rest of us were being shed like irrelevant detritus. It’s nothing at all like a cryptocurrency fork, where there’s a strong incentive to follow whatever the “majority” fork is doing because that’s where the money is.
Good writeup, but I don’t see the Fediverse as a single entity–if a single instance gets to 51%, and even 25% of the other instances fork and continue federating among themselves, then those 25% would function just as well, and likely maintain users with shared interests (i.e. how Lemmy is still interesting despite being much smaller than Reddit)
In my opinion in internet only thing that really matters is to preserve information of all kinds, for example this article https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/14/23792586/classic-game-preservation-video-game-history-foundation-esa and this is not only video games, YouTube too, Reddit too, stack overflow too, and many many many more, what hurts the most is that enormous amount of information may disappear at any moment, it feels like burning of library of Alexandria, so much of history is just going poof and this is when we have such technologies as modern filesystems supporting block based dedication and transparent compression and such cheap giant vessels of info, for example 20tb hdd cost around 350usd while just 10 years ago it would cost few thousands, i think billionaires are way too short sighted to not trying to really preserve and recover all the info possible
Why think they don’t? Amazon web service is, well, Amazon, so it’s like a Bezos-funded library - if he or other execs wish so they can preserve whatever they wish for as long as they can afford electricity and maintenance. The same goes with google or facebook … the real question is what will be chosen for preservation when inevitably the reaper comes for these corps in their current form.
As soon as money gets involved so does greed. And greed can destroy anything very very quickly.
I think we need a way to have lemmy handle “netsplits” more like IRC and less like “community went poof”. IDK if people are working on this (making the communities distributed), but I think there are existing technical solutions that can be leveraged if the devs don’t want to solve it themselves.
I’ve seen some active instances die due to admin neglect (not paying the bills, for instance), and I’ve wondered how those communities have fared since, since they’d have to start over elsewhere, and without all the content and history from their origin server. Same goes with user accounts too.
