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Myth: The #Fediverse™ Is Decentralised™
I run my own #Mastodon instance just for myself. An instance of one. What does that mean on today’s fediverse?
It means I’m on mastodon.social.
What?
That makes no sense!
Let me explain:
Since I have my own instance, surely I decide who I follow and anyone can follow me, right?
Wrong.
For ~1M accounts, Eugen decides. If he blocks my instance, a large number of people who follow me today will no longer be able to.
So I may as well be on his server.
The same goes for other large servers.
Look at how many of the people you interact with are on the handful of the largest servers and imagine that just those handful of servers blocked your server.
Come, let‘s take this further…
Apparently Facebook/Meta is “joining” the fediverse. How nice of them. Now imagine that the largest instance is run by Zuckerberg. (Or <insert your favourite Silicon Valley billionaire here>.)
Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social…
@aral this is what basically happened with XMPP. All big players joined, only to build walled gardens later and excluding anyone that had their smaller servers.
@fishidwardrobe @aral for me the point is to don't trust them, they are doing this only for their business, not for the people.
@jsoriano @aral Don't trust who? Facebook? Sure? One of the hundred or so independent XMPP servers still running? Not so much. https://list.jabber.at/
@fishidwardrobe @aral yes Meta, or any other big player that expresses support for an open protocol.