Not only is #BlueSky extremely not billionaire-proof, neither is #Fediverse. Nothing is safe from billionaires. But bsky is as vulnerable to hostile takeover as Twitter was, more than fedi.
@thomasjwebb Fediverse cant be fully taken over by any one company, person, or group like the others can though.
Immune to billionaires? No.
Immune to billionaire takeover and control of the entire platform? Absolutely.
@BeAware yeah I see it as more resiliant to being hijacked than bluesky but by no means invincible. It's promising that more and more small businesses are adopting fediverse. I'm less worried that Meta could control the whole thing now than I was a year ago.
@BeAware@mementomori.social@thomasjwebb how would they be able to control 30,000+ individually owned websites? How would anyone be able to control that?
@BeAware @thomasjwebb It's like saying someone can control the Internet. Fun fact: ActivityPub (the protocol that drives Mastodon and other Fediverse apps) is an official W3C recommended standard and W3C is lead by (drumroll) who other than the creator of the World Wide Web itself, sir Tim Berners-Lee. This is why I trust more to truly user driven social web Fediverse rather than corporate driven Bluesky.
@rolle @BeAware @thomasjwebb i don't totaly agree since it would not be very difficult to ddos instances via activitypub which is far from being a nice respectful protocol. Eg keep asking for all medias. If it doesn't blow the server it might at ieast explose its costs...
@Tacitus @rolle @thomasjwebb DDOS isn't the same as purchasing a platform outright and having control over how that platform works.
Furthermore, if it can be proven intentional, DDOS is illegal.
@BeAware @Tacitus @rolle The main point of my OP was that bsky is more vulnerable to a takeover, contrary to the ads they're putting out bragging that they're "billionaire-proof."
The problem that's referring to is the phenomenon of a communication tool attaining enough network effect, then getting hijacked. That could still be a problem on fedi if the market is concentrated in too few servers.
And let's not forget when W3C's specs didn't magically force Microsoft to behave.
@BeAware @Tacitus @rolle this is not something that can simply be understood by looking at specs. You have to think about the game theory of it. There's nothing *technologically* stopping every last user on Facebook from leaving yet they don't. If one server gets large enough market share, they could simply turn off federation if that suits them. Insert concerns people had about how Threads might have harmed the fediverse (which I personally thought were overblown, but not preposterous).
@thomasjwebb @BeAware @Tacitus Many use the example of XMPP that it was killed off by Google in this manner, but some disagree: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/26/xmpp-google
What makes it more difficult for Mastodon to be extinguished is the anti corporate and anti commercial attitude in general, and the fact even largest instance mastodon.social has enforced these principles.
It's rare to see truly open source and non profit software in this scale, emphasis on the word scale. XMPP and many others never really got the foothold without for-profit companies. Mastodon in the other hand has succeeded already in that regard, on its own. So this makes Threads' "help" not really needed.
@rolle @thomasjwebb @BeAware I agree XMPP was one example I had in mind and the fear I had about the impact of federating with Threads and how it could harm and simply destroy small instances : having a popular toot being federated is painful with activitypub.
@Tacitus @thomasjwebb @BeAware "having a popular toot being federated is painful with activitypub"
What do you mean?
@rolle @thomasjwebb @BeAware sorry, I ment from a technical pov.When all viewers or big instances try to get your toot or media in a toot or whorse a link preview generated by clients. These generate a LOT of requests and connections and small servers can really crash.
So when very big players like Meta announced coming to the game I really was afraid. The only solution being, to my knowledge, having big servers in front, thus eliminating small players and reducing the Fedivers main interest.
@Tacitus @thomasjwebb @BeAware Mastodon is built really resource efficient. Its sidekiq workers and caching are brilliantly made. So if the servers are properly built, there is no risk in that. My posts been trending and gone viral many times (thousands of boosts and even more views) and not a single hiccup here.
@BeAware @thomasjwebb I talk about why Fedi is far more resilient than Bsky to billionaire takeover here https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/15/bluesky-wont-free-your-feed.
But I think the real threat to Fedi isn't billionaires trying to influence AP or buying up the big Fedi servers. Nope, it's this --> https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/17/legal-and-regulatory-threats-to-the-fediverse
Which unfortunately, as we have seen in the US, VERY vulnerable to billionaire influence (Governments of the world that is)
@shellsharks @thomasjwebb as far as I was made aware, an owner of a social site is not responsible to a reasonable degree of what users post on the website. I'm sure the same would apply to Fedi instances. Even moreso once it goes to court and the fine details of how Fediverse works could be laid out.
So if someone uploads illegal content, Fedi instance owners shouldn't have to worry too much as long as they take action if it's reported.
@BeAware @thomasjwebb Yes. This is true. Under current laws. But, these laws can change, and are currently under attack as we speak - https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230. If billionaires wanted to slap down the Fediverse, this is the kinda thing they'd go for, not buying up fedi servers or whatever normally works on centralized services. Make it SCARY for normal folks like us to run fedi servers that can be attacked with malicious spam.
