Can a billionaire buy the “Fediverso”?
Since Musk bought Twitter, there is a massive migration of users to the Fediverse these days. For heaven's sake, we have already seen it, and the result is that after some time the users got bored, and they all returned to Twitter, or to the social network (more or less in crisis) than before.
When India introduced new social moderation rules, millions of Indian users ended up on the fediverse. They spent the first two weeks wondering "why don't I still have 5000 followers here after two weeks?", And "how do I become as famous as on twitter?". Then they all went back to twitter.
So I'm not under the illusion that the phony will stay long. They arrived here and they go to say “eh, how nice, here we talk about interesting things”. Then they'll put in the picture of their boobs, no one is going to sneak around, and they'll walk away because they can't monetize the boobs.
And so on.
However, as there have been several ignorant articles in the newspapers claiming the impossibility for Elon Musk of the situation to "buy the fediverse", I am about to give them some bad news. That is: he can do it all right.
Sure, the fediverse is "decentralized". But how bad is it? What is the distribution of users per instance?
As you can see, the "big" instances are very few, and much bigger. This means that, considering a total population of 5 million people, it is enough to buy a dozen instances to have, in fact, the largest portion of the universe in your hands: you can collect the data, you could insert advertisements, and so on.
The fediverse, due to the users' inability to understand its nature, already has a very serious problem: concentration. It is federated, but it already has a concentration problem.
why is this a problem? Because the bigger the instance, the more it costs. Network, server, etc. Consequently, those who manage the large servers will find themselves in a position to have to finance themselves, or will find themselves short of money.
The perfect prey for the situation Musk.
The truth is that if you want to run a server at home, with a few dozen users, having a raspberry Pi, a USB / SSD disk and a normal broadband connection is enough. And that's the way it should be, and that's what he was born for. That's what I do, even if I use machines other than the RaspBerry, that is, the Odroid.
But the point is precisely this: the idea of fediverse does NOT include gigantic instances, but consists in distributing the load, data and users on small instances.
But those who are dominating the landscape today have no idea of building the fediverse: they intend to become looming in a certain area of the fediverse itself. Mainly for business purposes.
Or maybe he hopes that one day the Musk of the situation will knock on his door, and offer him some money to buy the server, the users and their data.
However yes, with a few coins you can buy the fediverse, simply by buying the few dozen more populated instances. And given how users behave, the problem is bound to persist.
But let's go to the second problem: the software.
The fediverse is based on a protocol. This is good, because regardless of the protocol you can still federate and be present, with the software you want. This should, in theory, ensure that no one can take control, or buy, the company that makes the social network and take all control.
It's true?
No.
There's a German guy here: https://de.linkedin.com/in/gargron
As you can see, it is a commercial enterprise (not a non-profit organization or an NGO, to say) that has profit as its precise purpose. In short, he would like to become facebook. This company, in addition to producing the software, manages the largest instance of the fediverse.
Now, since the incompetent journalist has started to call the fediverse "Mastodon", which instead is made up of many software, the idea is spreading that the fediverse is "Mastodon". And not for nothing, the vast majority of users are on Mastodon instances.
The question is: what happens if Musk buys Mastodon? It happens that if you buy it. And how many platforms (Pleroma, Misskey, etc) can you buy? There are about twenty in all.
And what happens if he buys them all, with an overall small amount? Well, it happens that suddenly he's in control of all the code.
In other words, almost all of these software are opensource, but very few are maintained by open communities. Moral? You can buy them.
And once you buy the software from the programmers, you can put the algorithms you want into it, the advertising, and so on.
In general, therefore, the fediverse is NOT particularly robust against possible climbing. And this is because it betrays its premises:
- users focus on a few instances, betraying the premise of decentralization
- users focus on few software, betraying the premise of open federation.
obviously I'm talking about small numbers, so the difference between 4 and 5 million users (the twitter leak I am talking about) is too microscopic.
It is true that the European Union has opened its instance
which will give even greater importance to the fediverse, but as long as the bad practices of piling up on one software and a few instances continue, the chance that the fediverse will become resilient to takeovers and attacks are very slim.
A hacker, in fact, will NEVER waste time to get the data of the 13 people who are on my instance. Not worth it. But it will waste time on an instance that has the data of half a million people.
Another reason why it would be better to remain scattered on many small instances.
But it's not done, because the user is stupid, the programmer is greedy, and these two things are the main ingredients that have produced today's social networks.