I don't see enough talk of how the fediverse is structurally resistant to external power.
here, corporations and governments don't have any central node to pressure to suppress activity that conflicts with their interests. they could at most pressure one instance at a time, but there's no way to ever get their way across the entire fediverse at once.
the importance of this feature is tremendous.
@8zu yes but the powerful always prefer to control dissent. wiping it out can create too much backlash. and while they can break the network temporarily, they can't wipe it out altogether.
@abgd coordinated sock puppets :(
@abgd I think this is true but governments and corporations have power enough to put down all of these instances in a minute. Certainly we have the power to scale up our instances to be more fault tolerant and backpressure-based
@abgd I thought that was the original idea behind federating, with all the other benefits simply bonuses to that...
@mux2000 Definitely one of the original ideas, but with all the hot takes and meta toots in the last few days I haven't seen it foregrounded very much...
the Powers That Be prefer centralized organization. it's their game and they're very good at it.
decentralization is something they have a much harder time dealing with.
@abgd to be fair, tho, like, governments do have a LOT of resources for applying pressure to many people.
@abgd Beware, though, network can be broken by targeted attack of the biggest nodes.