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this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
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Technology
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Ideally, the fediverse will help people in censorious countries access information their governments don't want them to see, but I am not too optimistic, I used to think that about the entire Internet and look where we are now, governments around the world are very much managing to control the spread of information on it.
I still think that fedi will help, and in fact I am pretty sure it is helping already, simply because it is quite decentralized. Blocking 20k+ instances is not trivial. And each of these instances is an entrypoint, so to speak, into the broader fedi. Missing even one is thus a big deal. If my instance is blocked, I can set up an account on a different one, follow the same people, and I am back in business.
At the same time all these instances are run independently. One can't simply threaten the whole fedi to force it to do a thing (say, take down an account), this just does not make sense.
Compare and contrast with centralized services like Facebook, gatekeepers like Cloudflare, and so on. Threatening one big entity with problems might be enough to "convince it" to take a thing down.
The reason governments and other powerful entities are able to control the information flow is because there are these hugely important single points of failure. Fedi is not perfect (
mastodon.socialis way too big for its own good…), but it is a step in the right direction.I intentionally didn't register on big instances like lemmy.world or mastodon.social in order to avoid being part of obvious places to censor.