Comment on A take on an "ideal" fediverse
kpw@kbin.social 10 months agoSo we should defederate because we will have issues defederating due to the amount of content we lose? Isn't that kind of self-contradictory?
Comment on A take on an "ideal" fediverse
kpw@kbin.social 10 months agoSo we should defederate because we will have issues defederating due to the amount of content we lose? Isn't that kind of self-contradictory?
ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social 10 months ago
Let me try to explain a bit better.
Let's take an instance called Instance A. Instance A is currently on the fediverse, which we'll say is pretty evenly distributed. No instance has a large enough portion of users whereby others would have problems with activity loss if they defederated, which is good. If any instance starts doing things that Instance A doesn't agree with, they can defederate, and less activity won't be much of a concern with defederating from that single instance.
But now, let's take Instance B. Instance B is planning to implement ActivityPub and join the fediverse, and when it does so, it will control 80% of the activity. In other words, it has as much activity as the rest of the fediverse combined.
However, Instance B isn't particularly trustworthy. They don't value the open web like the rest of the fediverse does, their moderation is extremely poor, and they haven't cared for general well being in the past if it meant raising profits.
Here, Instance A and instances like it have two options: defederate immediately, or wait and see.
However, let's say Instance B starts having moderation issues (e.g., widespread hate speech and more-than-usual spam) as everyone reasonably predicted. Instance A now wants to defederate.
In other words, if people on Instance A come to rely on Instance B for the activity they're used to, way more people will join the camp of "I'm leaving if you defederate with Instance B" then if Instance A just defederated from the get-go.
Let's take another example. Instance B wants to try to grab a bunch of users, so after some time, they stop federating at all.
In either case, Instance B will be fine. Most interaction was between Instance B users, so this won't be that much of a deal. But for users on other instances that are used to seeing stuff from B, it'd be catastrophic.
In short, defederating immediately has much smaller consequences than trying to defederate when whoever you want to defederate from controls most of the activity that your users see.