One of the central things the Fediverse has to offer in online discussions is being able to pull out of toxic discussions without leaving one’s community. And while this already is nice in itself, it could also result in overall better designed social apps, because due to the possibility of migrating accounts and network effects, site owners are put into a position, in which they want to design their sites less toxic for their own benefit.
By the nature of how they are constructed, walled gardens create an environment, in which site owners are motivated to fuel conflict and design their apps this way, while in the Fediverse, site owners aren’t. This happens because of two things: first, they are motivated to put sufficient moderation tools in place not to lose users to other servers (which is much easier and less costly for users due to account migration) and secondly and more importantly: it doesn’t motivate them to fuel discussion, because escalating conflicts between communities could result in radio silence between communities, meaning less user interaction between its members, most likely leading to less user time spend on the servers. This doesn’t necessarily mean defederation. It is assumed that besides defederation, there are many other possible actions to reduce the interaction with another instance or user, for example by showing their posts less prominently on one’s home feed. In this sense, the number of moderation-actions between defederation and openly federating with an instance is thought of as a span on which communities and individuals dynamically move. And because of the first argument, these moderation actions will be much more powerful than in walled garden social media.
While the first argument is a trivial conclusion of federation: because of the open nature of the Fediverse, servers are motivated to put sufficient moderation tools in place and they will become more powerful than in walled garden, the second one is more interesting: because these advanced moderation actions exist, side owners are not only impartial to designing their applications to prevent conflicts from escalating; but its in fact beneficial for them to prevent escalation between communities and design their applications this way.
In walled gardens, heated and toxic discussions were no problem for the server owner (to a certain degree), because communities had nowhere else to go. In fact, they were even beneficial, because they increased the profit of the platform by generating more attention, which in turn generated more revenue. For the worst cases, rudimentary moderation tools were implemented, but only enough to keep public backlash at bay.
Now in the Fediverse, things don’t completely change: servers will still be motivated to maximize user engagement, however, while in walled gardens, this correlated with fuelling conflicts, in the Fediverse, they find themselves in a new dilemma here: because a community can just pull out of a discussion that it finds too heated or toxic, escalations of discussions can actually hurt the sides owners. In the worst case, communities split and don’t communicating with each other at all, leading to less user time. The possibility of severing the link to other parts of the network motivates the sides owners to prevent this type of behaviour as best as possible and design their sides in this way. While they do want to foster user engagement, they need to find a balance here that keeps the user experience much more in check than before. In contrast to walled gardens, server owners in the Fediverse hold a shared resource with the servers they federate with and therefore can push for a conflict-encouraging UI-design only so far, not only because users have the option to leave the server, but additionally, because it hurts their shared resource, which makes their server less attractive and gives users the motivation to actually go through with changing servers towards healthier parts of the network. While in walled gardens, servers are pulled toward conflict-encouraging designs, in the Fediverse, this pull is reversed towards discussion-encouraging designs.
All of this of course assumes that no instance holds a monopoly in the Fediverse, which in fact again puts them into a position to profit from toxic community interaction; and that a major part of communities is interested in productive interaction with other communities.
To summarize, while of course conflict-encouraging server design decisions can still happen here and the fact that server owners will want to create a healthy yet exciting environment comes with its own pitfalls too, ActivityPub creates a fundamentally different environment that encourages server owners to push for a discussion-encouraging UI-design, which could potentially provide a better ground for online discussions and interaction in the future.
At the end of last year, the Verge made a 2024-outlook with a big post on the future of social media, which was basically a pitch for the Fediverse. And it’s focus had been on: money. The narrative went something like the following: before the WWW, there was AOL, which decline eventually lead to a huge boost of innovation (and of course money), and now, the same thing is happening again. It’s a perfectly reasonable story, however, except for Meta’s big promises (and some smaller companies more or less successful endeavours), not much has happened on this front, yet.
Why? Because this time, it’s different.
Why is it that businesses aren’t yet flocking to the Fediverse? Why is it that except for some nerdy blogs and techie websites, its still basically invisible in the public debate?
Well, because there isn’t much money in it, yet and probably, this won’t change much in the near future. Think of it like this: how would you make money out of a newly created Fediverse server? Well, first of all you would need to get people on it. Either by building trust or by having some great features. Then, you would either start charging money for it, show ads or sell the data of your users. However, changes are high that people will then leave your server for a different one, where they get everything for free. Additionally, it’s not like in web1, where you visit a website to buy dog food and afterwards never visit it again; in social networks, you want to spend some time there. Getting people to join your network is hard enough, keeping them there and charging money for that even more.
And while some of them may accept a basic form of payment (let it be their data, their attention or an actual fee), monetization for providers will be much harder than in a walled garden, because basically there will always be someone who does the same but for a cheaper prize. When in the old world, the user was themselves a good, necessarily owned by the service to which they were inseparably bound to, they are now free to choose and are thereby their own means of production: their own social capital, which they can move around at will.
This means that actually, businesses will have a hard job getting money out of the whole thing.
The thing that does however lie in the Fediverse is the potential for social capital. Actually, huge amounts of that. The Fediverse will enable people to connect on the web itself to a degree that was unseen before.
However, companies aren’t necessarily great at generating social capital, and that only, if they can squeeze profit out of it effectively, which isn’t that easy in the open system that the Fediverse is.
This can be seen more as a good or more as a bad thing; however, it will probably shape the further development of the Fediverse and should probably be kept in mind: the Fediverse will probably not be overrun by businesses any time soon. So, collectives will have time to form on the Fediverse. However, it also means that they will have to do it. They have to move into the window of opportunity, before it is closed again by companies like Meta, who will eventually again turn everything into a walled garden once they have to increase their profit.
The Open Science Network could be exactly the thing needed here for three reasons:
It shows the huge potential of social capital in the Fediverse and gives it a concrete practical use case. It makes immediately sense to people and is something that one can show to people how the Fediverse actually works and why it’s important, apart from decentrality and that it isn’t owned by Elon Musk.
It combines social capital with a common resource everybody wants to have access to and that becomes more valuable, the more people are connected to it: knowledge.
Twitter and other services and concepts of the web became big exactly through this: with the help of the science community. First came the nerds, then the scientists, then the gamers and Harry Potter fans, then the normies.
The Open Science Network could be the “IT”-project, the Fediverse has so long waited for. It’s a positive project, people understand it immediately, and it’s also a cool project for the open-source community to contribute to.
However, if that’s the case, it would most likely result in a significant power shift within the Fediverse. Up until now there are three big players in the Fediverse and its environment: Threads, BlueSky and the Fediverse itself. For simplicity, we will look at them here as more or less different collectives. The most obvious observation is that they are fierce rivals of one another, as for example the bridge between Fedi and BlueSky showed, the hostility by some parts of the Mastodon community towards Threads, or the deafening silence between Threads and BlueSky.
However, the entering of an open science collective could create a new situation: since knowledge gets more valuable the more people are connected to it, a common resource is created, which creates a completely new situation. Instead of fighting over social capital of different users, they would suddenly try to get the favours of the open science collective.
This would put the open science collective in a very comfortable position and force the other collectives at least to not pull the plug on federating with the others, at least not permanently. In any case, it would give the development of and the project of the Fediverse as a whole, a big boost most likely.
At the same time, it should be kept in mind that making something like the open science collective happen in the first place will most likely not be done by companies (because they don’t even want to), but by the open-source and science community themselves.
When the creation of the WWW let people create their own town squares, markets and fairs on the internet, now, the Fediverse let’s them create their own towns and universities around it. But because not many people are there yet, the landscape is huge and there is much of free-of-charge-places, it’s hard to charge money for something.
Nilay Patel: “The fediverse might happen. I think it’s exciting. Do you think that all of this space is going to create new sunlight reaching ground and new things will happen? […] Hank Green: “I do. What I worry about is that there’s not a ton of random money sitting around.”
There will come a point when things happening on the web will become more important than what happens outside of it. And maybe, we are already past that, finding ourselves tumbling towards disaster … many of the current political discussions and conflicts come from the internet. I think people still greatly underestimate how much influence the internet by now has.
In my last post, I described large collectives that will emerge with the rise of the Fediverse. However, I have to correct myself: they were always already there, they just now are getting more and more important.
The big digital collectives could be something like the following:
Christians/Traditionalists/Conservatives (currently Evangelicals most notably)
Potter Heads
Gamers
All of these collectives have their own trades as well as own forms of teaching their members digital skills that are needed in their collective; the Gamers for example through Game Programming, the Pop-Queen-fans are more apt at promoting their own gods on social media, while open-source enthusiasts provide much material for programming themselves.
Probably, no one of these collectives is going to disappear, they will most likely stay. The important thing for the internet community will be, to make sure, they don’t radicalise. Because each one of them has its own radical impulses. Most of the time, this means declaring their principles natural law and try enforcing them on all other collectives.
And our current problem is, that too many of them are beginning to radicalize inside the walled gardens that make most of the internet today.
The Problem: The Different Reigns of the Web and the long Consumerist Reign in the 20s
If these collectives existed since the beginning of the web, of course they also played a major role in its rise and there were more and less powerful in all the time the web has been around.
As we all know, during the early 2000s, the Harry Potter collective had a major reign. After that, during the 10s and late 10s, other collectives threw them off its throne and we lived through the reign of the consumer, gaming, eco-queer and the pop collective. Now, it seems like the right is striking back in the form of Trumpism, bitcoin bros and the gaming-communities’ bad impulses.
But maybe, if the nerd-collective manages to bolster up the Harry Potter-Collective again and collaborates with the other collectives that are still interested in liberal democracy, they might be able to hold back against the backlash from the right. And the only way for this, leads through the Fediverse, which only they can provide. But they will need to control their own impulses and let other collectives thrive within their own space.
But to understand that we need to take a closer look at the history of the web through the lenses of these collectives.
The nerds were the original settlers of the web, and they never forgave for being kicked out of it, though eventually, they had to ally with the consumer collective.
Apart from the nerds, there were also the scientists. They were kicked out of the equation first. I don’t want to blame anyone, but the consumer-collective at some point took over. And at a later point, another big collective appeared, that basically completely took over the position that the science collective once held: the H.P. collective, giving a positive outlook on how the internet should look and most importantly: feel like. Like being in a magic world, were clicks are like spells.
Through this power-shift thanks to the consumer collective, the science-collective was replaced by the H.P. collective and future optimism ran rampant, it could almost be felt in the air. But the coalition came at a price: the consumer collective had become too powerful and not nearly had enough.
The thing is: as long as a collective stays democratic, it should have a right to exist on the social digital landscape. But in the last decade, the evangelical/Christian collective, who didn’t want to join this coalition, felt excluded from this. That’s why now, when they have the chance, they try to get as much space on the web as possible, not knowing that soon with the Fediverse, there will be plenty of space for everyone.
My strategy would be to show them this dream and remind them that their allies, for example people like Musk, hate tradition and traditional hierarchies, they want to dismantle and disrupt them, while they want to conserve them, actually don’t really fit in with their values.
I’m not a conservative by any means, but these people still need their space to grow on the web, if they keep certain basic rules, even if some things of them are weird. But just trying to exclude them from the whole thing won’t work either and for most of these conservative communities, the web really did reck havoc in some of them. They are just not prepared for unlimited access to pornography for example. They, too, need their save spaces, as ridiculous as it sounds, because they are denying them for queer people, but maybe, hopefully, at some point, they will accept them as well? Nothing against a moderate, secularized Christian collective on the web, right? In the Fediverse, this could be possible, in the social media of walled gardens, not so much.
Currently, we see heavy fighting between consumer, eco-queer, gaming and the H.P. collective, because the consumer-collective pushed too hard and eroded too many institutional and societal connections. But they are not coming out of their conundrum and their close interrelation with the consumer-collective without the nerd-collective, which is still angry because it was kicked out of the alliance a while back.
All the while, another contender is aiming for the pole-position, who wants to exploit the bickering of the ruling collectives: the crypto-Musk collective seems to join forces with the evangelical-Trumpism collective.
The remaining non-radical forces factions (yes, again with the consumer-collective) should unite to divide the two, which actually don’t even have that much in common, push through to the Fediverse and ensure a peaceful living for all of them:
Currently, the democratic forces are losing the cultural fight. But the left itself has collaborated way too long with the consumer-collective, which radicalized itself on it and now, they feel bad for it and are in turn even more radical, turning on themselves, while the nerd-collective hides away in the Fediverse with a smug face of the self-assurance that it had always been the right thing not to invest in the web anymore, because it is going to shit now anyways, when all they do is to show their own cowardice and woundedness for giving the web over to the consumer’s collective in the first place (or letting it been done by the H.P., then science-collective) and laughing their head off together with the Marxist collective in the back seats of a truck headed for disaster.
Instead, we can prevent the reign of the Musk-Crypto-Trumpism collective and instead push through to the Fediverse, were no rule by anyone is needed in the first place and everybody can have their own space. But for this to be possible, the queer collective will need to be a bit less radical themselves, because they too have becoming very protective, denying the H.P. to join the democratic part of the collectives.
And we will also need to consumer-collective to join. Because of anything, we want to prevent a trump-consumerism-musk-collective, which would be truly hell and end in a truly dystopian version of the web.
Hopefully, by pushing this whole conflict into the Fediverse, we are still able to solve it to prevent worse, although I’m not anymore so sure about this happening in time …
We should anyways remind ourselves that whichever parts of the collectives map we don’t like – they will not disappear, and we need to learn to tolerate them and only act actively out on them, if they radicalize themselves too much. On the contrary: I would argue that each of the collectives have specific use; I for example was introduced to programming on the web through the gaming collective, to its communities through Harry Potter and to collaborating and actively shaping this space through the open-source and Fediverse-community; and I think most people on the web have a history on multiple of these collectives, while probably feeling closer to some than to others.
To summarize: we take the whole battle somewhere else: the Fediverse. There, the democratic forces of the web can re-order themselves and take a strong stand against trumpist and musk-collectives, which have a much worse standing in this environment (at least if their goal is to divide the rest of the web).
The future of the web depends on it.
The Goal: On Uniting the Web
If this is what the so-called cultural war actually looks like:
Why are the democratic forces loosing? Well, because they can’t get over their quarrelling and just unite.
Of course, the nerd-collectives want to protect the new land that they discovered and not lose it like last time, but to same the web and democracy as a whole, they may need to voluntarily open it up to others to stop greater bad from happening even though they may still want some kind to do it right: they have no choice but to urge them to join.
And suddenly, the situation looks a whole lot of different:
And now who is winning the cultural war?
Another Obstacle, or: The Promised Land
(Disclaimer: Of course, migrating into the Fediverse is something different and in no way literary comparable to the actual colonialization of America with their history of colonialism and slavery)
Many has already been written about the joining of the Fediverse by Threads and what can be said for sure, is that there is a big nervousness about it. And one of the biggest (if not the biggest) reason for this is not that Threads might exploit its power. That’s basically a given. But that the arrival of Threads will mean big change. Many new citizens will come into the Fediverse, and they will be much different from the ones that are there currently and probably, the Fediverse will look afterwards much different than today. In other words: the arrival of Threads means first of all: change.
There is no guarantee that these people will show respect to the Fediverse or it’s implicit rules. On the contrary, it can almost be expected that they don’t care for them. Many of them won’t even know that they are on the Fediverse and will expect the same that from walled garden social media.
And: many of the ones that want to actually build and shape it, will be quite radical. Like it has always been: the first travels are those that seek adventure and leave behind something, they come with very high hopes and often enough, these hopes are not met. Nevertheless, the Fediverse should try to build a place, in which all collectives can thrive, if they hold themselves to some basic rules thus ensuring cooperation or at least a basic sense of coexistence.
So: expect for the next big surge of the Fediverse the Fanatics, looking for their promised Land
Somewhat like with America, the first settlers were puritans, narrow and brutal in their views. And like that, it’s also on the web. But it makes sense: they are looking for the promised land. And it doesn’t mean that one day, they can’t be the shoulders on which the west rests.
If the promises are true, the Fediverse will soon be a sprawling ecosystem, meaning money and hopes (https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub) – just like the new land in its time. This will of course also attract fortune and adventure seekers; and those looking for something like their own promised land, like the settlers of America of their time. And these are also often enough fanatics of some sort or the other. Nevertheless, they will be crucial when building the Fediverse and its future. Therefore, we need to think about which people we want to attract and maybe even court first.
This means for the different collectives, the first people to come will be the following:
Pop-queens: swifties, etc.
Marxists: Marxist-leninists
Nerds: ethical hackers, anarchists, die-hard-Linux-enthusiasts etc.
Eco-Queers: radical activists
Christians: evangelicals
Consumers: ?
Musk-Fanboys: Crypto-Bros
Gamers: Streamers
Harry Potter: Potter Heads
And if they are coming, even if it might feel wrong to think that way, we do need to think in which state these collectives currently are and which of them we should invite to join the Fediverse and promote it in their collectives and which are currently in not a good state, and we should try to keep away from the Fediverse for now. In my opinion, the Christian/traditional collective and the crypto collective are not in a good state currently.
It can be said in general that, because they are settlers, the first members of the collectives that will come will be rather radical, outcasts, having nothing to lose, meaning they will push the collectives in the Fediverse to their radical edges, straining their principles or overstepping them, meaning it will at the beginning even harder to keep them together and uphold principles of liberality and cooperation. First there will probably be chaos. Who comes into the Fediverse to help build it, usually wants something out of it: some dream to come true. To reach some kind of promised land, straining the room the Fediverse gives.
But as already seen on the Fediverse, this seems to be manageable: the Fediverse may actually be the place in which the collectives might breathe again and find their stance again to fight the un-democratic forces in its own middle. Maybe it actually has enough room to give all of these dreams enough space that they might just seem possible, while always keeping them from becoming reality by checks from the other collectives.
In a sense, this is also re-assuring: it doesn’t really change that much. Everything already exists on the web, it will just soon even more come to the light and hopefully, we manage to pull it back onto a healthier course.
What we definitely need to prevent is the world tumbling into a world war because they don’t understand the power of their own technology, like it was in World War 1, and which is considered by many (though I don’t completely agree on this) to be the root catastrophe of the twentieth century. Why not learn from history and just don’t do it this time and instead unite and talk? After all, we all have the right to strive for happiness, whatever that might look like, as long as it stays under the hood of liberal democracy.
The silver lining in all of this is that most of the collectives are already here: Christian, Marxists, Harry Potter Fans, Crypto bros, and it works fine enough. At the same time, the Fediverse is still little, but to unite the web and overcome these boundaries that divide us, it needs to grow.
But for that, we need to untangle the whole unfortunate situation of the quarrelling collectives in walled gardens and get them in the Fediverse somehow.
A Possible Solution: A Union with the H.P. Collective (the Queer-Potter-Nerd-Coalition)
I think we can agree that the current situation isn’t exactly great:
It simply doesn’t work like that. It leaves us divided and produces more and more conflicts, which have their effect in the real world as well. The Fediverse is the only thing that can save this from escalating. Now some people will say that some of these collectives we don’t want on the Fediverse. But if someone should be for plurality, it should be those in the Fediverse (as long as they hold themselves to certain principles of course)! But how to get this whole thing started?
Not that it will be very easy to pull the collectives out of their walled garden misery. Many sure still want to stay. The pop queens for example just like the consumers will surely not be interested in building their own place on the web. They want everything already setup nice and clean. And while the gamers probably have the second-best builders (after all, they are already starting to build their own Metaverse on Roblox and Minecraft) they currently have their own problem with toxicity.
So far, the coalition with the queer collective has proven to be very beneficial for both sides, but it won’t be enough: we still need an important ingrediency, maybe the most important of it all: stories and a collective with a fable for them. And in the best case, it would also be willing to help building the Fediverse. The Potter collective has lots of artists, they are the masters of fanfiction, as well as builders and have also deep roots in the queer collective (even though culturally, they are currently someway at odds).
Instead, if we take a look at the people that are already on Threads and that will soon join the Fediverse. Let’s face it: most of them only know walled gardens. They simply won’t get the Fediverse for a long time. The potter heads on the other hand, were always there when the web made a new shift, and they have definitely emancipated themselves from Rowling. And even if some of them aren’t: discuss it with them. The Fediverse is big enough for this. Let’s show the world what the Fediverse is capable of in terms of overcoming borders and in terms of plurality while still fighting for our values. And with their stories and sheer cultural impact, they could give the whole thing some kind of momentum.
In this sense, I think the intolerance of the queer collective stems from the experience that they had on the web in the last decades: that of abuse and harassment in online spaces because of a lack of moderation in spaces operated by the consumer collectives, like for example on Tumblr and big walled garden social media. And because of that, they are now very protective of whom they want to ally with. But this could proof to be ineffective. I think when building a new web that should not be dominated by the consumer collective, we should get all the help that we can get. If we instead try to create the perfect save space, we will only further radicalize. Let’s not kid ourselves that only Christians can develop totalitarian, sect-like structures if pushing for too much safety.
In summary: Potters are alright, and more than that: they could be very good allies in their skills and in their spirit. So yes, I think the best collective to seek out would be the Potter Heads, because they are the ones that could be actually interested in building their own place on the web, as well as having the right conviction to hold against the bad parts of the web. Because they did it before: they build their forums, their own websites, they will be a driving force of the Fediverse anyways, the question is whether we will greet them or try to fight them. If we could win them as our allies, we could really create a shift on the web and it also makes sense: the evangelicals used to burn Harry Potter books. Harry Potter used to be avant-garde! Let’s not forget that.
This could already be enough to shift the tide on the web towards democracy: maybe consumerism, Swifties and Gamers will move over and we can divide evangelicals/trumpists and crypto bros!
I think, it is quite promising:
The Nerds would have the tech
The Queers would have the moral conviction for moderation and building save communities
The Potters would have the stories and cultural heritage to fill it with life
For the rest of the web: we are actually more united than we think; in this sense: Nerds, Queer Folks and Potter Heads Unite! The Swifties, Gamers and Consumers will follow on foot!
Instead of hiding away in our shelters, hoping that somehow, it will all turn out all right, we should do what we do best: building. For example a Harry Potter/Hogwarts instance on Lemmy and Mastodon. We should actively aim for a better position on the web of the future and by this, being able to shape its development instead of just reacting to it.
A single, abusive entity or a group of abusive entities in the Fediverse has gained more than 51 percent of influence
They start EEE
Other instances either react by defederating, but because they only have 49 percent, due to network effects, they get extinct; or they chose to still federate, which will extinct them also because of EEE
Now, measuring influence in the Fediverse is inherently challenging, given its abstract nature. The extent of influence is tied to societal capital invested in the Fediverse, including legal and economic factors. The potential influence is also constrained by the number of users, although this is limited and may increase predictably over time. Societal factors, such as the impact of institutions like the European Union, contribute to the overall influence landscape. Despite these variables, it’s crucial to acknowledge that influence in the Fediverse remains something fundamentally limited at a certain point in time and that this limit and its hypothetical value, are strictly correlating to the size of human population.
Back to the actual threat scenario: some may recognize this, because it is basically the social equivalent to the 51% attack of crypto currencies as pointed out by @carrotcypher@reddit.com. And, as already said, of course, social influence is a different thing than actually owing parts of a crypto currency, it is hard to measure, but as the same with crypto currencies, it is fixed at a certain amount of time. I want to add to this, that, while I’m not against technical ideas per se, I want to point out that I’m opposed the societal utopias and promises of crypto kids. I believe in public institutions, our societies should be built on trust; for me, a trust-less society is a dystopia. Actually, I hope that the Fediverse will help us to rebuild institutions, which enable people to trust each other again.
However, we are nowhere near this, because currently, the Fediverse is not resilient enough for the described 51% attack. In fact, Mastodon itself would have enough influence to pull a 51% attack, but it is very unlikely to do so given the creator’s behaviour in the past. But while that’s a very lucky thing to have, the issue is that we depend on the owner of Mastodon to not sell the company to a billionaire. And while currently, the influence is heavily owned by Mastodon, if Threads gains the 1 billion users that they are going for, they may already have the amount of power to pull a 51% attack and perform EEE on the Fediverse.
Some will now ask: why can’t this attack be easily prevented with the Fedipact (fedi-instances that plan to permanently block Threads and exclude it from the Fediverse)? Well, because, at least according to some, the Fediverse will soon enter a new stage, that of full-on commercialization (https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub). This will be at the latest when Threads starts federating with Mastodon and there is just no possibility that no instance will federate with Threads and companies jumping on that train as well. So it is hardly anything stopping this development and “keeping Threads little”. It will not stay little. It will become bigger and bigger and increase its influence. Either the “free” Fediverse can try to influence this or stay out of it but also cast away responsibility and watch while the Fediverse enshittificaits.
Overall, the good news here is: as long as the “free” Fediverse gains influence at the same rate Meta is gaining influence so that it never gets over the 51 percent of influence, we will be fine. On the other hand, it could become hard to manage to do just that. So, to counter-act this attack scenario, I drafted a first strategy called “Embrace, Extend, Enforce (ƎƎƎ)” in this post: https://fungiverse.wordpress.com/2023/12/28/embrace-extend-enforce-a-practical-strategy-against-potentially-abusive-instances-like-metas-threads/ Hopefully, it will be extended and applied in the future to make the Fediverse truly proof to abusive entities.