I’m going to keep this short but I just fell down the rabbithole of crypto again and maybe it isn’t as bad as I thought. Many of their ideas are very similar to the fediverse’s. The idea of decentralized finance using a stablecoin sounds awesome to me. (though i’d much prefer to live in a world where money isn’t needed) Maybe the technology is actually good but the techbros and scammers ruin it with their false promises and complicated words. Hopefully, in a few years after the rest of those scammers have moved on to scamming with AI this tech could be truly used for meaningful purposes.
I would say that the Fediverse, Lemmy, Etc. are diametrically opposed to blockchain in the way each approaches decentralization.
The blockchain/crypto, tries to “solve” decentralization by creating a trustless database that nobody can own. It assumes that the technology is perfect software, executing the same code for everyone, equally, without outside interference. It requires all users to be equal, that any changes be made in the interest of the collective.
What actually happens, especially as you scale up, is that early investors are disproportionately valued, while wealthy investors can dump tons of money into mining. These stakeholders then expect a profit in return, and the loop of enshittification begins. The stakeholders can apply pressure to fork or update the blockchain in ways that favor them, and normal people have no recourse to do anything.
Blockchain is also, by design, incredibly inefficient. Bitcoin, which caps at 7 transactions per second, cannot scale to any meaningful, and require third-party exchanges to perform transactions OFF the blockchain taking a cut of the cost in the process. The various proof-of-stake can achieve reasonable TPS rates, but also require a third-party to provide collateral, which again gives them power over the platform. And sure, you could make your own small cryptocurrency, but to federatate your coin to other coins you still need a third-party exchange!
The Fediverse, by contrast, is based on the idea of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS). It thinks that private, for-profit entities shouldn’t control public resources, and that technology is best when it is transparent and accessible to everyone. Here, decentralization is a tool. While ActivityPub (the technology behind the Fediverse) is decentralized in implementation, the standard is maintained by a central governing body (the W3C, an international non-profit consortium).
Another difference is that ActivityPub isn’t “trustless” like blockchain. On a Fediverse social media platform, like Lemmy, each server is an independent central authority, a unique database of users, posts, and interactions. Rules and decisions are governed by their administrators, and the moderators they appoint. It only achieves decentralization by allowing these servers to federate by (and this is key) trusting other servers. Trust is the default, which is antithetical to the blockchain. Admins can then revoke trust for malicious actors. You can see this happening now on Mastodon with the news about Meta joining the Fediverse, the Fediverse Pact, and the ripple affects on mstdn.social and mastodon.art.
Blockchain ultimately fails as a technology because the core assumption it makes is flawed. A truly trustless system cannot exist. You trust the programmers who make a blockchain or ActivityPub that their source code does what it says it does, and they haven’t secretly modified anything. You have to trust the third-parties that make crypto exchanges and Lemmy instances with your personal data and to operate as promised. You have to trust the other users you send money to or reply to in the comments. By viewing “decentralization” as the solution and “trust” as the problem, blockchain dooms itself to never accomplish anything of value.