Why the Fediverse is not (yet) Billionaire-Proof, or: The 51% Attack for the Fediverse

buntspecht@lemmy.ca@lemmy.ca to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 29 points –
Why the Fediverse is not (yet) Billionaire-Proof, or: The 51% Attack for the Fediverse
fungiverse.wordpress.com
15

At this point it almost feels like these articles, of which one shows up every 3-5 days, are all just AI generated. They tick the required buzzwords like EEE and Enshittifcation, say absolutely nothing at all, and paint the dreary future scenarios with the same intentionally evasive care of a doomsday prophet avoiding getting nailed on any specifics.

You never get any infos about anything. Like:

  • How would EEE even work in the context of ActivityPub? (assuming that's what they mean by "the fediverse", the use of which was the first big hint that humans didn't write this text)
  • Why social media users are all game theory experts playing single victor zero sum games in their heads before they navigate to a web site, each and every time?
  • How enshittification would look, or rather how it would affect other apps using AP?
  • How enshittification of AP itself would look?

Ugh and probably a ton more. It's fun to go all doompriest on this topic for a while, but weeks later with the same context-free text repackaged and reposted ever time, it just feels silly.

Unless this is a caricature and I just got majorly wooshed. Then I look really silly now. ๐Ÿ˜…

No I agree. They keep echoing the same worries without actually providing solutions. There was one I read with some interesting ideas, but the vast majority are all doom and gloom.

At this point we all know the same dangers. We all have awareness. Start proposing changes to protect ActivityPub or just step aside please.

It's becoming just noise instead of useful discourse. Yes. I'll probably federate with threads at the beginning until moderation becomes too much to handle myself, then I'll defederate. That might be an hour, it might be a year.

They keep echoing the same worries without actually providing solutions. ... Start proposing changes to protect ActivityPub or just step aside please.

That is a non sequitur. Maybe the doomers are right and AP is simply non-viable in the long run, and the right thing to do is abandon it rather than protect it. That said, I couldn't make much sense of the linked article. I did like the description "51% attack" which I hadn't seen in that context before. It's not exactly accurate but it's a nice metaphor.

(assuming that's what they mean by "the fediverse", the use of which was the first big hint that humans didn't write this text)

What do you mean? Do humans not say 'the fediverse'? I've seen plenty of people use it. We are even in a community called fediverse

They talk about someone targeting something at "the fediverse" as if that was a thing. An entity. Hence me suspecting AI, it's the typical kind of tokenization thing an LLM does, while a human writer actually wanting to explore corporate involvement avenues would have to quickly discuss the differences between trying to get a foot in with the protocol ActivityPub, taking over stewardship of the code of an application running on top of AP (like Lemmy or Mastodon) or even running readymade setups of the existing code.

None of which are happening right now but they're also so different that bundling them together makes no sense as you cannot make any argument across all 3 of them.

But to a tokenizer, we users say "the fediverse" enough that it might just think it's a single thing. ๐Ÿ˜…

Whatโ€™s even worse is that their site has no option to decline cookies. Even the most evil of corpo sites do this to comply with EU

and who the fk is bluebbberry123

This is nonsense. The fediverse isn't cryptocurrency. Having 51% of the fediverse doesn't give you any more control than having 1%. If your instance(s) implement a feature that the rest of the fediverse doesn't like, they can defederate.

Other instances either react by defederating, but because they only have 49 percent, due to network effects, they get extinct

If 49% of the fediverse defederates from the other 51%, it is now 100% of a new, smaller fediverse. You can't just claim that "network effects" will cause them to go extinct. Whether those instances have enough userbase to sustain a cohesive network depends on the actual number of instances/users. And the fediverse has sustained itself for over a decade with less than the current ~2 million accts and most of that time it had substantially less than 1 active accts.

It seems unlikely that a 51% attack will do anything worse than the ~30000% attackers we currently deal with.

This is just some random person's blog post and you people are acting like this is supposed to be journalism?