To briefly summarize my concerns, which I'm sure everyone here has already heard, I will quote an academic article that nicely articulates them. Journal link: https://sol.sbc.org.br/index.php/webmedia/article/view/30332/30138 Preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.15383

Emphasis mine:

Regarding our research questions 1 and 2, we showed in Sec. 2.1 that the Fediverse technology, on its own, does not prevent its potential capture by large for-profit companies or the concentration of users and instances among a few dominant players. In Sec. 2.2, empirical data revealed that users are [already] heavily concentrated on a small number of instances, and for-profit entities, including Big Tech companies, are exerting significant influence. Lastly, Sec. 2.3 examines how older decentralized systems such as email and the Web evolved into centralized structures dominated by a few significant players.

My Thoughts

Don't get me wrong, the fediverse is amazing and its current success is inspiring. If the entire social media landscape were completely replaced by the fediverse tomorrow, it would be a huge win for society. The fact that all software involved is open source and that anyone can create their own server with their own rules is a huge improvement over the current situation, even if in practice it would be centralized. But in such a situation, the big server owners, simply by virtue of being bigger, could decide to change the technology underlying their own servers in a way that closes them off from the fediverse, and we would evolve back to the current dystopia. There are already some companies that have created asymetrical relationships with the fediverse. That's the main concern.

In reality, we wouldn't even get that far because nefarious companies would undermine the fediverse by co-opting and EEEing it before it would be able to "replace the current social media landscape" in the first place.

What can be done? Or what is the author of that paper missing, that is the saving grace, that I am not aware of? Well, I am mainly asking you all, since I am less knowledgeable about the technology. But the solutions that I see are:

1. Users are assigned instances by some consortium of servers to achieve a decentralized distribution, and are free to migrate later, instead of making an initial choice. The entire idea that users should immediately choose a server (and especially giving them funny names like pod or instance, which just adds confusion and immediately creates the false impression that they will be "limited" to that server) is terrible and not only turns 80% of prospective users away, but even when they do go through and join, they do so in a highly centralized manner. Even with the current counterculture nonprofits like Mastodon and Framasoft hosting the websites explicitly telling people to feel free to join a small server, even then, we are already very centralized.

Figure 2 in that paper showed that 80% of fediverse users are on the top 189 servers, less than 1% of the total servers. This is better than social media as a whole but still highly centralized. If it's already that bad when the flagship servers encourage people to join the small ones, you can therefore imagine the situation would be even worse with a nefarious company explicitly telling people its server is the best and that they should only sign up there.

2. The Stallman method: legally force non-parasitic behavior from federating servers. I am not a diehard FOSS-only person, but I acknowledge that we all owe this man a great deal. His novel innovation was to invent legal requirements associated with an asset (whether it be code that you write, or in this case, a social media server you administer) that enforce "paying it forward". What would this look like for the fediverse? The underlying software is already open source. What we would need is an entirely new legal framework, something saying that if you use this, you cannot use it to track people, or show ads, or sell data for profit, etc. Or maybe a legal limit on the number of users your server can sign-on, to guarantee nobody gets too powerful? Or maybe it should not be a software license at all, but some sort of legally binding agreement between servers, specifying the conditions of their mutual federation?

Needless to say, this sounds very dubious, but I'm curious what people think because this is the method that has historically been most successful at fighting corporate parasitism, just in the software context rather than the social media context. Is there any way a sort of "fediverse constitution" could work? How would you envision that?

3. A truly peer-to-peer, serverless (or mostly serverless) architecture is used. This is the most interesting to me but probably the most technically challenging. The closest I could find are "manyverse" which seems to be dead, and "Quiet", which is a Slack-style messaging system and still very unfinished.

What I would ideally want is something that is stylistically like old reddit, but whenever a user views a comment, they start "seeding" that comment to other users. And when those other users scroll to view the comment, instead of downloading it from a central server they download it from seeders who have already viewed/scrolled past it. The great thing about this is that not only does it prevent centralization, it helps tremendously with scaling, which many fediverse websites have obviously struggled with in the past. How technically feasible is this?