Comment on If we're going to have an effective strategy against FB/Meta, we should clear up some misconceptions around defederation

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Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

This is a dangerous type of question as it implies we need a reason to add federation. Instead of being federated being the default state, hence the question would be about benefits of defederation.

And like I said above, it’s not like there isn’t potential benefits to that. But it’s important to keep in mind that not only might we be misinterpreting why Meta is adding federation (I’ll stick to my explanation, it’s not about the actual federation it’s about pre-empting regulation) we might end up making their use-case stronger (“we tried to add interoperability, no one else was interested, so that’s why we aren’t doing it” might be a valid excuse to lawmakers).

On a bigger-than-just-meta picture, it’s also important to keep in mind that should the concept of federation take off, Meta will not be the only commercial company pushing into federated applications, especially if lawmakers start pushing into that direction in the EU. In other words, defederating Meta would merely delay the inevitable, and it might be less of a waste of time to focus on how to ensure the protocol itself works against bad faith actors gaining too much power - which, might I add, can also exist on a smaller scale. If you only got 100 users, a 90 user instance controls 90% of the federated space, and can just as well exert pressure onto the protocol itself, we just trust instance owners to not do that right now, in particular the really big ones.

Again, note that I do not list benefits. Like I said, that’s the wrong direction to inquire in.

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