Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future | TechCrunch
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Consumers are hungry for a new way of social networking, where trust and safety are paramount and power isn't centralized with a Big Tech CEO in charge...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7456748

The mission-driven tech company behind the Firefox browser, Pocket reader and other apps is now investing its energy into the so-called “fediverse” — a collection of decentralized social networking applications, like Mastodon, that communicate with one another over the ActivityPub protocol.

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think the problem there is that if the fediverse were to be adopted by the masses the general population wouldn’t pay attention/wouldn’t even care and just use whatever instance was most convenient for them, and if an insurance has a large proportion of users it inherently has power over the entire network

    If meta entered properly like everyone thought they might, they could massively control the entire fediverse by threatening defederation with instances that don’t comply with their rules. Because they have so many users and generate so much content no instance wants to be cut off

    That example probably wouldn’t work for the fediverse as it stands right now as we’re pretty much all nerds, dislike companies like meta and probably wouldn’t enjoy the content generated by its users anyway but it stands as an example

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
      1·
      1 year ago

      My “secret” is I’m fine defederating with fb or any other larger player because nerds are all I really want to socialize with anyway. Those of us here would lose nothing by fb joining and defederating.

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        I get that, that was the whole point of that comment is the likes of us wouldn’t want to interact with Facebook but as I said that’s just an example.

        Imagine the chaos if Reddit implemented activitypub, or discord with their threads feature, or even just a new instance like world that snaps up a lot of users for one reason or another, plays it safe for a while and acts benign until they’ve got the bulk of the users and then starts imposing their rules on other instances