Escaping ruling class and corporate domination is one of the reasons some people choose to migrate to the Fediverse. Even some of the other reasons, like ads, engagement obsession, political censorship, content sorting algorithms, can all be traced back to corporate control.
While corporations don’t have much control of the Fediverse today, could they in the future?
One might think that Fediverse is designed to make this impossible. In my opinion, it is only designed to somewhat resist this, but it is still vulnerable to ruling class takeover. The ruling class doesn’t need that now, as they already control all major social networks, and Fediverse remains a niche. But shall that change, they might be out to try to control it. Can they succeed?
I’ll admit and say I am very far from an expert, so I hope someone will correct me if I make any mistakes due to misunderstanding the Fediverse.
Instead of centralizing a social network in a single instance controlled by a single entity, the Fediverse can be federated into multiple instances. However, to host an instance, requires some investment, and although it can be small for some services, it is a barrier that many people choose not to cross.
Hence, as we have already seen, instances are controlled by either organizations or groups who pooled funds for their instance, or individuals who incurred the initial investment themselves. Not bad, so far. However, this does present an issue. If the Fediverse were to grow more instances, people who have money are more capable of starting new instances. It also favors people who don’t live in countries where salaries and cost of living are lower, which would make renting VPS even more expensive to them. This gap is closed as the software gets better and more lightweight, but as it stands, this is how it works.
The other problem is that many Fediverse networks are already sort of centralized, in the sense that there is one (sometimes a handful) of instances that are biggest. This means If someone were to take over just those, they may already have enough control. This is less of a problem for platforms that matured more and have more instances.
If someone like Elon Musk were to go after the biggest instances and either offer money to buy them (which is very likely to work) or somehow pursue censoring the instances that don’t, although that is not as easy as buying a single company (ignoring the cost difference), it is still quite easy. We haven’t seen it because they haven’t sought it yet, but I fear that the Fediverse is not as resistant to this as it should.
Nice, and I mostly agree with it. I also translated that ‘fedi speak’ about “ruling class” to market dynamics in my reply. Basically the forces of hypercapitalism taking, first a foothold, and then control. I am very much in favor of de-emphasizing the role of money in our society, but at the same time don’t reject the notion that we have an economy where money is a natural part, a necessary tool, to make it work at scale. I am not against forms of monetization in the free software community, but they should be oriented towards establishing sustainable business and have a different set of values that are safeguarded in this new environment. By extension I see that for the future of the fediverse too. But it is tricky, of course. Solving the decades old stuggle of FOSS and ‘tragedy of the commons’ basically. Though some people have negative outlooks of how that struggle is progressing (with the log4j security event, for instance) I feel a very positive vibe emerging. There are a lot initiatives moving into the proper direction. And many of those can be found on the fediverse.