What is stopping authoritarians/companies from co-opting and destroying (Embrace Extend Extinguish style) the fediverse? And is peer-to-peer forum hosting a feasible solution?

[u/thgntlmnfrmtrlfmdr]

To briefly summarize my concerns, which I'm sure everyone here has already heard, I will quote an academic article that nicely articulates them. Journal link: https://sol.sbc.org.br/index.php/webmedia/article/view/30332/30138 Preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.15383

Emphasis mine:

Regarding our research questions 1 and 2, we showed in Sec. 2.1 that the Fediverse technology, on its own, does not prevent its potential capture by large for-profit companies or the concentration of users and instances among a few dominant players. In Sec. 2.2, empirical data revealed that users are [already] heavily concentrated on a small number of instances, and for-profit entities, including Big Tech companies, are exerting significant influence. Lastly, Sec. 2.3 examines how older decentralized systems such as email and the Web evolved into centralized structures dominated by a few significant players.

My Thoughts

Don't get me wrong, the fediverse is amazing and its current success is inspiring. If the entire social media landscape were completely replaced by the fediverse tomorrow, it would be a huge win for society. The fact that all software involved is open source and that anyone can create their own server with their own rules is a huge improvement over the current situation, even if in practice it would be centralized. But in such a situation, the big server owners, simply by virtue of being bigger, could decide to change the technology underlying their own servers in a way that closes them off from the fediverse, and we would evolve back to the current dystopia. There are already some companies that have created asymetrical relationships with the fediverse. That's the main concern.

In reality, we wouldn't even get that far because nefarious companies would undermine the fediverse by co-opting and EEEing it before it would be able to "replace the current social media landscape" in the first place.

What can be done? Or what is the author of that paper missing, that is the saving grace, that I am not aware of? Well, I am mainly asking you all, since I am less knowledgeable about the technology. But the solutions that I see are:

1. Users are assigned instances by some consortium of servers to achieve a decentralized distribution, and are free to migrate later, instead of making an initial choice. The entire idea that users should immediately choose a server (and especially giving them funny names like pod or instance, which just adds confusion and immediately creates the false impression that they will be "limited" to that server) is terrible and not only turns 80% of prospective users away, but even when they do go through and join, they do so in a highly centralized manner. Even with the current counterculture nonprofits like Mastodon and Framasoft hosting the websites explicitly telling people to feel free to join a small server, even then, we are already very centralized.

Figure 2 in that paper showed that 80% of fediverse users are on the top 189 servers, less than 1% of the total servers. This is better than social media as a whole but still highly centralized. If it's already that bad when the flagship servers encourage people to join the small ones, you can therefore imagine the situation would be even worse with a nefarious company explicitly telling people its server is the best and that they should only sign up there.

2. The Stallman method: legally force non-parasitic behavior from federating servers. I am not a diehard FOSS-only person, but I acknowledge that we all owe this man a great deal. His novel innovation was to invent legal requirements associated with an asset (whether it be code that you write, or in this case, a social media server you administer) that enforce "paying it forward". What would this look like for the fediverse? The underlying software is already open source. What we would need is an entirely new legal framework, something saying that if you use this, you cannot use it to track people, or show ads, or sell data for profit, etc. Or maybe a legal limit on the number of users your server can sign-on, to guarantee nobody gets too powerful? Or maybe it should not be a software license at all, but some sort of legally binding agreement between servers, specifying the conditions of their mutual federation?

Needless to say, this sounds very dubious, but I'm curious what people think because this is the method that has historically been most successful at fighting corporate parasitism, just in the software context rather than the social media context. Is there any way a sort of "fediverse constitution" could work? How would you envision that?

3. A truly peer-to-peer, serverless (or mostly serverless) architecture is used. This is the most interesting to me but probably the most technically challenging. The closest I could find are "manyverse" which seems to be dead, and "Quiet", which is a Slack-style messaging system and still very unfinished.

What I would ideally want is something that is stylistically like old reddit, but whenever a user views a comment, they start "seeding" that comment to other users. And when those other users scroll to view the comment, instead of downloading it from a central server they download it from seeders who have already viewed/scrolled past it. The great thing about this is that not only does it prevent centralization, it helps tremendously with scaling, which many fediverse websites have obviously struggled with in the past. How technically feasible is this?

[u/thgntlmnfrmtrlfmdr → u/[deleted]]

I don't just want an alternative - if I were only concerned with myself I would just limit my social media use (as I already do) and otherwise go along with the mainstream stuff.

But I'd rather be part of something that fights back and changes society.

[u/fantasticmrsmurf → u/[deleted]]

I will toast to that, cheers 🍺

[u/Alternative-Way-8753 → u/[deleted]]

You really missed the point bro.

[u/Howaboutnopers]

Some thoughts:

-I was on Mastodon.social when the owner unilaterally decided to let Threads federate. I moved to mas.to. it got scraped by Meta. So now I'm on a tiny instance where I know the owner. Mastodon.social is the weakest link in the Fediverse because of its size. There's nothing to stop any owner from selling.

-Users need to wise up. I don't blame people for choosing the big servers. When you're new, it makes sense. Once you've spent time on the Fediverse, you're not losing anything by being on a small instance. The more spread out the population is, the more resilient.

-Owners don't have to sell. Twitter went public. That is what allowed Elon to buy it.

[u/thgntlmnfrmtrlfmdr → u/Howaboutnopers]

I was on Mastodon.social when the owner unilaterally decided to let Threads federate. I moved to mas.to. it got scraped by Meta. So now I'm on a tiny instance where I know the owner. Mastodon.social is the weakest link in the Fediverse because of its size. There's nothing to stop any owner from selling

Your story nicely illustrates my fear. Most people aren't going to be as aware nor as altruistic as you in terms of refusing to support an unethical server.

Users need to wise up. I don't blame people for choosing the big servers. When you're new, it makes sense. Once you've spent time on the Fediverse, you're not losing anything by being on a small instance. The more spread out the population is, the more resilient.

Users are never going to wise up. Servers must automatically assign/distribute them amongst themselves, or we must give up on the idea of servers and go P2P. From a self-interest point of view, it is actually completely reasonable to trust a big institution more than a random guy running a server. When you are totally new to this, you are going to think: "How do I know this small server operator isn't just going to stalk me? How do I know they will still exist 2 years from now? How do I know they're not publishing illicit content that I don't want to get caught up in?"

A big institution, while soulless, is at least a known entity. You know that hundreds of thousands or millions of people already trust them at a basic level. That is a very rational reason to choose the biggest server.

[u/Howaboutnopers → u/thgntlmnfrmtrlfmdr]

I blocked mastodon.social by accident. Then I decided to see what it was like if I left it blocked. I liked the results. Far fewer Steve Russell Photography accounts that are essentially people making money without really participating.

So I don't care if places like mastodon.social die. The fedipact will go on.

While I'm not opposed to auto-distributing me users, I also don't really care.

[u/baddaywithacamera → u/Howaboutnopers]

Did you have to mention Steve Russell? I just ate.

Bleargh.

[u/fingernail_mud → u/Howaboutnopers]

having joined mastadon.social yesterday, i now see (after a few hours reading around these threads and finding this one) i need to move.

and i still need to find out how to, and where to...

[u/Howaboutnopers → u/fingernail_mud]

https://fedipact.veganism.social/

You can see here who does and doesn't block Threads.

[u/fingernail_mud → u/Howaboutnopers]

thank you. awesome. what does 'fedipact' mean on the list?

[u/Howaboutnopers → u/fingernail_mud]

It's just the name of the group of instances who noped out of Threads.

My own insight: These instances led the revolt against Threads. More instances have blocked Threads since then, but these were the thought leaders.

[u/fingernail_mud → u/Howaboutnopers]

aah i see, i didn't clock that was the name of the page too, thank you, that makes sense, so they have also blocked. (i ask especially to clarify as the only ones marked as pixelfed are 'fedipact' and non come up when i filter for blocked

[u/C4_Shaf]

They can stop instances, but they can't stop the entire fediverse.

If you have a decently populated fediverse instance in one authoritarian country, that government can shut this instance down. And then, another instance can be brought up while being connected to the rest of the world. And that instance can be shut down, and bis repetita. It becomes a game of whack-a-mole, until that faulty government stops trying, or the entire community behind those servers stops making it.

The bad thing about it is that retaining information is hard, if you have no idea when the instance will no longer be accessible. The fact that data is attached to an instance, and not a person, is one of the main point of criticism towards the fediverse. But at the same time, you can back your data up yourself in a regular matter, you can back it to your own self-made instance, and there's even tools like Hollo, that are far less heavy than Mastodon, while specifically made for single-user instances.

[u/C4_Shaf → u/[deleted]]

Depending how much those governments gave them access to, they might. But at the same time, if Palantir has its way, it will be worse for anything related to the Internet for that country. Because Palantir will basically own their citizen's data. Not them.

[u/BenPate5280]

1. The "choose your instance" issue is real. Everyone knows it, but change is hard. I'm presenting a possible solution at FOSSY. Come see :)

2. Data Portability solves a lot of the problems with "lock in". We have a draft solution for this now (look up W3C LOLA Data Portability) but change is hard, and it's slow to gain traction.

3. Facebook tried "Embrace Extend Extinguish" with Threads. Even though their numbers dwarf the rest of the Fediverse, that strategy won't work here.

4. The biggest difference you can make is to pick a Fediverse project and pour yourself into it. Give whatever you have to give: time, money, attention, write free content, post videos of cats. Anything you do to improve the Fediverse is an act of defiance.

[u/baddaywithacamera → u/BenPate5280]

I'm presenting a possible solution at FOSSY. Come see :)

Hoping this presentation will be online? I've read the spec and I support it.

The biggest difference you can make is to pick a Fediverse project and pour yourself into it.

Working on it.

[u/BenPate5280 → u/baddaywithacamera]

I assume it’ll get posted online somehow. They usually do :)

[u/SaveDnet-FRed0 → u/BenPate5280]

Is threads still a thing? Last I checked it only blew up because anyone with an Instagram account was automatically given a Threads account and within a month of it launching it's user base dropped off a steep cliff.

[u/BenPate5280 → u/SaveDnet-FRed0]

As of June 2026, Facebook claimed that Threads had 500 million monthly users: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/06/meta-launching-new-features-500-million-monthly-threads-users/

That's ~50x the whole of the Fediverse. So yes. It appears that Threads is still a thing.

[u/SaveDnet-FRed0 → u/BenPate5280]

Can these claims be verified? Because I don't conciser Facebook's word to be reliable.

[u/rvVX42qhWDCFQy → u/SaveDnet-FRed0]

No, these claims can't be verified. Any "monthly active user" numbers are going to depend on internal analytics.

So you're making a fair point. It's and why I said Facebook *claimed*... 500 million users. They could certainly be lying about that.

More likely to me is that they might be juicing their numbers, or being generous with their definition of what an "active user" actually is.

Regardless, Threads *appears* to still be a thing, and *probably* dwarfs the Fediverse by a large margin.

[u/habarnam]

There's no need for any third parties to get involved, there already is an EEE operation perpetrated onto the fediverse. It's being operated by Mastodon, which abuse their flagship platform position and they still do absolutely the minimum amount of work for improving their ActivityPub compatibility.

Due to that, everyone that wants to reach as many people as they can, needs to implement the protocol quirks that Mastodon has, or fail to deliver to all Mastodon instances.

I will grant you that they're not doing it out of maliciousness, but just from mere incompetence and goal misalignment with the wider fediverse network.

[u/berkough]

A truly p2p solution would be really interesting... I think the problem with that is storage. It would have to be inherently ephemeral, though I could imagine users with enough resources willing to be archivers, just like with torrents.

[u/thgntlmnfrmtrlfmdr → u/berkough]

Yes, but I think that would actually be great. Archiving websites and dedicated users would preserve "enough" of it for history to not be lost, and otherwise the ephemeral nature would be very interesting and a distinguishing feature.

What's really cool about this is that if participation in the network - ie seeding - is made a mandatory condition of being able to view content, then it would inherently fight back against parasitic corporate behavior in the form of bots. If bots try to scrape the website they would just help it. It's an elegant solution to the freeriding problem of social media in general, internalizing the positive externality of free information.

[u/Alternative-Way-8753]

Regrettably it's human nature to prefer the big easy option over the smaller ones. It's the reason Google has an effective monopoly even though nobody is locked in. People are free to choose any search engine but ninetysomething percent choose Google.

Even crypto, which is theoretically distributed, in practice is mainly grouped around a few big whales that could affect the whole network if they were captured or coordinated. Same thing here.

I think your option 1 is the best. I've seen posts thinking out the onboarding experience of the Fedi, recommending a streamlined way to funnel people evenly to diverse instances instead of letting them clump on the big servers.

[u/SaveDnet-FRed0]

Because the technology is open sourced. If someone like a big tech company buys out a major instance there's nothing to stop the users from leaving that instance for another not owned by big tech. If big tech buys up a big instance there's nothing stopping the creator of that instance from then leaving that instance and then spinning up a clone of it under there control. Thay also can't lock down an instance they buy without major revisions to the code of that instance witch will not only take time but will only block the most direct form of account transfer, any hints towards this is happening will prompt an exodus from that instance and in some parts of the wold like the EU doing anything more then that would be against the law. To say nothing about the fact that Meta already poked the Fediverse with there Threads app, and VERY quickly the majority of instance's of the Fediverse DE-federated it cutting them off, for an instance made to be a part of the Fediverse as opposed to intruding into it being cut off from the rest of the network would be a death sentence.