There are a large number of unanswered questions about the Fediverse. I don’t just mean questions that users may have, but questions for which no suitable answer exists yet. Some are extremely abstract and existential like “will the Fediverse survive the next decade?” Other questions are very concrete like, “What is the copyright status of a federated post?” or “What are the moral implications of federating content that may be harmful or recording a crime?”
I wonder, for those of you who stay up nights thinking about the Fediverse, which question is the most important to you?
I’d wager that enshittification is inevitable, but the Fediverse can “live on” between cycles because instances or even entire systems can go down while new Fediverse ones take their place.
Plus, fediverse clusters can break apart like tectonic plates and become continents if any serious barriers need to happen. It might happen over time if any instances start to specialize. Never know.
I’d be a shame if it really broke apart. I mean that would be more a De-Fediverse. Like all the Discourse forums where I need to open up every single one of them to read what’s new, because they’re specialized and not interconnected in practice. I’d advocate for the instances to still interconnect while doing whatever they want. And giving more control to the individual user. Ultimately… it’s complicated. We have things like (instance) local timelines in some federated software. And it’d be great to have distinct Lemmy places/instances. One for political debate and news, one dedicated to Free Software… That’s kind of what communities are for. But it’s the same people in all larger ones. And the instances all look the same, and topics and interests are not part of the onboarding process. So people currently end up on some random instance.
What’s to stop people from making “tunnel” instances, maybe even with reposts?
That aside, ultimately, we’re at the mercy of whoever is paying for the instance, and their interests. So if everything does fragment, it’s just kinda the nature of the hosts.
Sure. The nice thing is, it’s all Free Software. I pay like 6€ a month for my own small server. I’m at my own mercy.
rss!!!
I should do that. I got rid of my newsreader like 10 years ago when I noticed I was doomscrolling through the news every morning and afternoon. And it consumed too much of my energy. Maybe I should start fresh with a small and curated smaller list. I kind of forgot about RSS aside from podcasts… So thanks for the advice.