This is EXACTLY what will happen. Federation will just mean “fuck you, I’ll go make my own instance since you don’t 100% agree with me” creating splintered echo chambers that accomplish nothing because they fundamentally lack the ability to work with others. Federation will absolutely not lead the rebellion.
Just look how many Lemmy varients there already are. In the first few months we already had Kbin, Mastadon, Lemmy(and all of it’s instance variations) and then Kbin even split and also became Mbin as well(which was literally “I don’t like how they’re running Kbin and they won’t do what I want, so I’m starting my own” by user Melroy). Remember how the first drama was “which instances should we block on our instance?” on pretty much every single location? How everyone quickly set out to make a name for themselves by which communities they filtered out? How we didn’t even make it a month before instances were defederating each other?
Time and time again humans blame the tools they use instead of reflecting and seeing that the tool wasn’t the cause, humanity is. This is how humanity acts. We’re tribal by nature. This is what we do. You’re not gonna just fix that with some new software. It’ll take cultural change on a grand scale.
The federated internet is not an open park where everyone hangs out together. It’s a billion small spaces that link to neighbouring spaces. The idea that defederation is a problem, or that people using different webserver software is an issue, needs to be left at the door.
This isn’t “Reddit but with weirdly more complex subreddit names”, or “Twitter, but everyone’s user name looks like an email address”, but a network of a thousand independent social websites, each doing their own thing.
And that’s a good thing. Expecting it to be centralized, corporate social media, only without the drive towards enshitification will make everything seem uncanny and broken. This isn’t that. This is something new.
This is EXACTLY what will happen. Federation will just mean “fuck you, I’ll go make my own instance since you don’t 100% agree with me” creating splintered echo chambers that accomplish nothing because they fundamentally lack the ability to work with others. Federation will absolutely not lead the rebellion.
Just look how many Lemmy varients there already are. In the first few months we already had Kbin, Mastadon, Lemmy(and all of it’s instance variations) and then Kbin even split and also became Mbin as well(which was literally “I don’t like how they’re running Kbin and they won’t do what I want, so I’m starting my own” by user Melroy). Remember how the first drama was “which instances should we block on our instance?” on pretty much every single location? How everyone quickly set out to make a name for themselves by which communities they filtered out? How we didn’t even make it a month before instances were defederating each other?
Time and time again humans blame the tools they use instead of reflecting and seeing that the tool wasn’t the cause, humanity is. This is how humanity acts. We’re tribal by nature. This is what we do. You’re not gonna just fix that with some new software. It’ll take cultural change on a grand scale.
The federated internet is not an open park where everyone hangs out together. It’s a billion small spaces that link to neighbouring spaces. The idea that defederation is a problem, or that people using different webserver software is an issue, needs to be left at the door.
This isn’t “Reddit but with weirdly more complex subreddit names”, or “Twitter, but everyone’s user name looks like an email address”, but a network of a thousand independent social websites, each doing their own thing.
And that’s a good thing. Expecting it to be centralized, corporate social media, only without the drive towards enshitification will make everything seem uncanny and broken. This isn’t that. This is something new.
And something old.