Another “governance” think tank has its eye on the fediverse
infrastructureinsights.fund
Three months ago I posted about the Atlantic Council’s interest in the controlling the fediverse: https://lemmy.ml/post/6641106
I think these projects are the continuation of the successful American “intelligence community” censorship of corporate social media platforms. They even tried to formalize the system two years ago as the Disinformation Governance Board.
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This Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.
Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps "whatever Mastodon is doing". That's problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.
I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That's fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.
I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing. They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.
Good to hear.
Yeah. Plus, the sheer size of
mastodon.socialand the monoculture of Mastodon-based instances is just unhealthy. I wrote about it at length.Agreed, Kissane and Kazemi are community forces to be reckoned with in this context. Their research into governance has been funded for at least the first half of 2024.
Wonderful!
I think Mastodon is already compromised
I think throwing around vague but scary-sounding terms like "compromised" is a very bad idea.