The GenP subreddit got banned on Reddit. We can only take a guess as to why(I seriously don’t know, please let me know if you do).
But regardless, it brings up a serious question. How will big corpos and nations force their control on lemmy and other fediverse communities?
Places like reddit, twitter, instagram and even “fediverse” bluesky cave to demands from corporates and countries all the time. But what happens when the real fediverse platforms get attention?
How will they ban, sabotage and coerce instances and communities to cave into demands?
I know lemmy and other fediverse platforms are still very small right now, but I believe it’s only time before the sabotage begins. Instagram stepping into the territory tells you how scared zuck already is.
And How will we get around this?
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Complex requirements for social media websites to verify the identity of users, respond to spurious automated takedown requests, provide authorities with backdoors, etc. I think instead of explicit bans, it’s more likely they pass a regulations that are made for large websites with lawyers and algorithmic moderation, which are in practice not something fediverse instance operators can safely deal with and go against the basic values of the open internet.
The fediverse has some resilience built in. As users have a back up account. As an admin with concerns of government control, have a playbook to be able to pass off control of the instance to another admin in a different jurisdiction and that they can restore the instance to a new provider from backups.
As for stopping corporate interference: making sure bad actors like meta can’t federate, good moderation practices, and anti bot defenses. Intelligence sharing between instance admins, cooperation not competition.
Lemmy.world is trying very hard to comply with the law. I think the same is true for lemm.ee; in that sense, they have already caved.
Sooner or later, EU governments are going to take a closer look at the fediverse. There are very loud demands that regulations should be more vigorously enforced. Some instances may not survive.
Maybe what happens first is that some instance gets sued. Maybe by the copyright industry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was some disgruntled user.
The EU doesn’t value the freedom of information (“free speech”) in the same way as the US, and a lot of people on the fediverse will tell you that it’s just more American bullshit. You shouldn’t assume that there is any “we” that wants to get around regulations.
Support your instance admins. Donate, volunteer, and don’t make their lives more difficult. You lose them, you lose your community, we all lose this whole thing we’ve built.
Apart from running many instances which keeps copies of other communities which happens automatically when a user on an instance subscribes to a community; organize larger instances into well funded non-profits that can weather attacks. Lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works and Lemmy.world already have non-profits formed. An example of what this could look like is the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously won’t be as wealthy at least not in the short term.
That actually sounds like a great idea. However, I feel like that won’t be enough to stop countries from wanting to ban fediverse platforms outright(if they decide to do so). I even read a news article talking about the how the current US administration doesn’t like Wikipedia because they are spreading “propoganda”. Or like how thy are trying to force change in independent universities by cutting their funding.
We can’t stop sovereign countries from banning services. We can however have external Fediverse services not comply with cutting off access to users from those sovereign countries, leaving it up them to ensure their citizens don’t have access. Since we’re not making off of doing business in those countries we can ignore non-legal requests instead of voluntarily complying. Then some of the more technical people in such places could use the existing tools for blocking circumvention in order to access the Fediverse if they really want to.
I’m guessing in the same way as Bit Torrent and others before it … with big flaming headlines, politicians foaming at the mouth, lawyers rubbing their hands with glee and the world for the general public becoming a little bit more shit whilst the actual miscreants carry on with impunity on some other platform or get funded by venture capitalists who make everything legal but no less palatable.
Source: I’ve been here for a while.
Careful civil disobedience is the sensible way to deal with an uncivilized government.
They will try to fill instances with bots, propaganda accounts, etc. They’ll DDOS them. They’ll try to get them shut down at the hosting level or cut off their donations by having credit card companies blacklist them
Instances are smaller so it’ll be easier overall. Lemmy.world and even my own instance don’t want to deal with piracy. That’s how Yuzu got shut down so easily. They had nothing to fight with…
…That’s until somebody sets up an instance in Russia and starts hosting piracy forums there
Embrace extend extinguish, or FUD campaign to prevent widespread adoption
Through legal actions probably. They’ll sue and the volunteers who manage these instances will cave in because they have a mortgage/lease to pay and possibly a family to take care of, etc.
On the technical side they could abuse API calls although that wouldn’r be necessary because using the current API setup but flooding it with massive amounts of data would be a burden on locally hosted instances. The main reason I am opposed to Threads and other social media federating with their massive amounts of mediocre to crap data would be overwhelming for both instances and users. Yeah, there are blocks and all that but if the server is dying from being overwhelmed with traffic it doesn’t matter.
The big players can damage the fediverse simply by being allowed to federate.
