If Lemmy became popular, what would prevent any three-letter agency from opening a server to get all the user data?
If Lemmy became popular, what would prevent any three-letter agency from opening a server to get all the user data?
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I would assume the fediverse is like the US government where a new state cannot be admitted to the union without the consent of the other states, which would ensure for example that something like the Church of Scientology couldn't make Lemmy.ology, though maybe I'm just taking that rule of thumb for granted.
That's unfortunately not how it works at all, it's an block-list model rather than an allow-list
Unless I misunderstand something, that sounds like it would defeat one of the core purposes of a fediverse. If there is no membership coordination, it at least seems like it would be less a council and more like what it would be if it was just a group of sites with a common goal.
Are people downvoting what I was saying because they think I was asserting a statement of fact or because they disagree with that being how it should work (or because I used Scientology in my example)? Cue the line "this is why we can't have nice things".
The fediverse isn't any kind of council, it's just sites which use the same protocol to put their information in a form they all understand. It is open by default.
There are implications to the protocol though, for example you and I can communicate despite being registered to different parts of the fediverse. The lack of any safeguards against a group being unruly in ways that affect the rest of the fediverse (Lemmygrad comes to mind) seems like something that would backfire, kind of like if I was queen of a territory but then joined the US as a state and then proceeded to send people to the three branches of government just to troll the system. But there are safeguards against that, just not on Lemmy.
The safeguard is defederating from that rogue instance