this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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You forgot the biggest most originalist one of all. Email.
Yes, often overlooked. And, I hear, almost impossible to selfhost these days without a degree in CS, because "we block all non big tech e-mail providers".
Probably even with a CS degree.
It's just a hassle to maintain, and too mission critical to have it go down.
I wonder if the same won't happen with the fediverse, if we let some instances get too large.
I have a degree in CS... actually spent some time implementing email protocol as part of a class to send test messages through I think websockets in Java or something. It was really interesting and kind of a cool project.
Yeah, I ain't touching that shit. I'll more than happily let my domain name provider manage that for me so I can focus on ~~bigger and better things~~ going through yet another Civilization 5 Vox Populi campaign.
Going down isn't the problem. Keeping an email server alive isn't difficult.
Your messages getting summarily rejected by just about everyone is the problem.
Why would the instances isolate? They don't seem to have as much incentive to rent seek as big tech.
Yea and no. The email “big tech club” happened under a pretense of spam blocking because back then spam and bots were a new concept. We now know a bit more about it and have anti-spam measures built into, e.g. even lemmy so I don’t think big tech will be able to use spam itself to piggy back on. At the same time Facebook has already announced Fediverse integration, and while there’s a petition to defederate from it as soon as they bring their servers up - what’s going to happen if Facebook+Twitter+Reddit decide to hop on the fediverse bandwagon? There’s just too much juicy content there right now. The FOSS Fediverse will have a tough time choosing between accessing all of that juicy content or keep the team values up. Now all of the mentioned sites are in decline, so as long as FOSS fediverse gains momentum faster than Big Tech unites I think we’re safe.
The Facebook bit is my concern as well.
However, I'm not so sure we'd be able to avoid it, even if big tech did not get involved.
For example, beehaw.org does not federate with a lot of other instances. How long until a few big lemmy instances decide they are important enough to block everything by default? Probably not going to happen anytime soon, but it could be a foreshadowing.
I think people should be incentivised to join the smaller instances. But I guess most new people coming to the fediverse don't know that you can talk with other instances.
Well critical mass is the issue here. Social media sites are “fun” only if there are people there posting, talking. So it’s perfectly fine is there are say, 5 fediverse isolated islands that don’t talk to each other as long as each island has critical mass it‘ll be sustainable.
Also the benefit of fediverse is that I don’t need to understand that different communities are on different instances - I just go into search and find communities I want. Yeah some will have funky @names appended to them but I don’t need to understand what that means in order to interact with those communities.