[riceart]

> With federation, there is no longer an incentive to do so, because you don't have a moat

Domination is orthogonal to a technical federation feature. Once there is enough imbalance you defederate and that’s that. There’s nothing that inherently prevents gross imbalance from forming and the natural forces favoring centralization - such as funding one beefy instance - still apply.

> value proposition for an instance to turn off federation today?

Maybe not today, but it would be the same as any historical netsplit.

> What do you think would happen if Reddit only had 1/2 of the subreddits anyone used and if you could keep access to all the same communities on a competitor?

I think that puts them still in a fucking dominant position. And why automatically assume competitor vs cabal?

Anyway good luck with your project.

I’ve been using the internet since IRC and Usenet - both federated in their own way - both completely marginal.

[sudosysgen]

There actually is something preventing gross imbalance from forming. Slightly different choices in federation for large instances with regards to extremists are a big one, and since power-users tend to be central to the content and won't move instances from the beginning too easily, there is strong inertia against communities forming exclusively on one instance.

IRC was never federated. Usenet was, and it did die out - but so is email and it's working far longer than it had any right to.

[riceart]

> IRC was never federated.

What? What do you think the term “relay” in IRC means? The jargon term netsplit used even for newer federated networks (even used in these comments elsewhere) comes from IRC. There is literally an entire network named after a defederation event.

Now we sort of take for granted that IRC is basically a closed federated system - but the original design of the network was one dominant set of relays - EFnet is a direct descendant of this network after all - if anything it’s just a specific example of politics and network evolution. There are technical reasons as well - but at the time of the early splits of the 90s (EFnet, Undernet) it was not primarily technical problems.

Anyone involved in a fediverse I think would do well to learn some lessons from IRC even if their system is technically superior.

> but so is email

As a federated system barely - go try to stand up an email server on your home network or VPS and see how well that works. It’s run by a cabal of large providers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30224478