Imagine a world without platform lock-in, where no ban or billionaire could take down your social network. That’s what ActivityPub has planned.
One of my concerns is that a big corp adopts it, makes it popular and contributes to it so much that they might as well own it. For example, imagine a company like Microsoft or Google ends up making an instance and their own software like Lemmy or kbin. Since they have the money to develop, refine it and advertise, it could gain mainstream popularity and people start creating communities and content inside Microsoft’s or Google’s instance. If it grows to a point where 80%-95% of the content generated is from that single instance then what happens then? Sure we can still create accounts on Lemmy.world or kbin.social and see that content but we’re relying on the content on their instance. If they decide to defederate then we lose all that content so then you’ll have to create an account with them to access it (just like Reddit). And if we don’t we’ll have to start over again, at least when it comes to content.
I’m still figuring out how all of this works so I might be wrong.
You’ve almost got it. The thing is when you view content posted to another instance you’re not actually accessing the other instances, you’re viewing a copy of those posts stored on your instance. Federation works by distributing copies to all federated instances.
So if a big company like Google did as you said, and then suddenly defederated from everyone, you wouldn’t actually lose any of the content. All those posts up until the point of defederation would still be stored on every instance they were previously federated with. You would just stop getting new posts from that point forward.
There’s a bit of weirdness though, since the “true” post on the hosting instance is what handles syncing/distributing copies. So any new posts you made to those communities or comments on those posts couldn’t be copied back to the true post and then spread to the other instances. So everyone ends up with a desynced “ghost community”. So while you might see new posts/comments in those ghost communities from people on your instance, they don’t get synced to any other instance. (If you’re on an instance that beehaw.org recently defederated from, you can see that in action right now.)
So at the very least, the content would still be backed up, but you’re right in that people would need to “start over” and create new communities with new mods and new posts if they wanted the content to be federated. We just wouldn’t lose the old content.
Of course it can’t, but it can help some of us make at least a small part of the internet as safe as we can, if we’re willing to put in the effort to do so.
I have hope but my big concern is the scalability/efficiency of the thing. SOOoo much data is getting copied and duplicated across the federation links, and in some ways that’s good, but it also bloats the overall cost of operation and that bloat makes it all the harder for altruism and donations alone to keep things afloat.
Save the internet from what? Being owned by large corporations? Maybe. Stopping the spread of misinformation through echo chambers and getting rid of hate speech? No, definitely not.
That’s what ActivityPub has planned.
Well, that is kind of what ActivityPub is already allowing us to do.