This paper examines the potential of the Fediverse, a federated network of social media and content platforms, to counter the centralization and dominance of commercial platforms on the social Web. We gather evidence from the technology powering the Fediverse (especially the ActivityPub protocol), current statistical data regarding Fediverse user distribution over instances, and the status of two older, similar, decentralized technologies: e-mail and the Web. Our findings suggest that Fediverse will face significant challenges in fulfilling its decentralization promises, potentially hindering its ability to positively impact the social Web on a large scale.

Lemmy mentioned＼( °□° )／

  • RagingHungryPanda@lemm.eeEnglish
    24·
    7 days ago

    Tl;dr - fediverse probably won’t do too much, and it does have discoverability issues, along with migration issues

    • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      7 days ago

      Discoverability issues as per yesterdays search giants methods of crawling the web.

      It’s quite clear that companies like Google and Microsoft are vulnerable in the search game right now.

      I mean in the end you’re probably right, but if there were ever a time for a well-funded group to take aim at the suddenly low barriered entry, I think this is probably Custer’s last stand.

  • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    They define decentralisation as an even distribution of users? Or did I get that wrong skimming the paper?

    This seems arbitrary. Mastodon is a decentralised network, no matter how big Mastodon.social is. Lemmy is equally decentralised, even though there’s a dominant actor.

    The other hubs in the network don’t revolve around mastodon.social/lemmy.world. they connect to each other bilaterally - if the central hubs disappeared over night it wouldn’t affect them all that much.

    I think the notion that decentralised networks can’t have hubs of varying sizes is plain wrong, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralized means.