I don't know about accountability on the part of the participants, but in theory it ought to be harder to attack because success means coordinating a consistent (maliciously-altered) experience across infra maintained by a wider variety of people, some of whom might be harder to coerce than others.
In practice, I don't know how much that would matter. If I were the kind of powerful actor that federation is supposed to guard against, I'd use DNS poisoning and crooked CA's/ISP's to work at the network level rather than attempting to corrupt each server admin separately.
So I see it as a good start, but really only meaningful if we de-root-of-trust those things also.
Serious question: why are we talking about Wikipedia like it has the same shape of trust problem as the Web PKI? With Wikipedia, you or I or anybody else can go and edit out the obvious misinformation. That leaves subtle misinformation, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that.
It's already "hard" to attack Wikipedia, in the sense that there's an army of pedantic dorks ready to argue about anything already on it. Which is a different kind of hard than attacking a PKI.
I could be off base here, but I see federation as a way of ensuring that those with privileged access can't leverage control over the whole platform. If they try, others will block the parts which have been corrupted, and the rest will carry on.
If you're willing to win the hearts and minds of an army of pedantic nerds, it matters little whether you're on a federated platform or not: you're playing by the rules.
So my thinking was: Of the types of privileged access that might be used to sidestep the nerds, which of these does Ibis prevent? So far as I can tell, it's misbehaving server admins (of the type that Musk might be capable of pushing around) but not misbehaving ISP or CA employees (of the type that a government might be capable of pushing around).
If it's not actually a matter of who-are-the-bullies-and-what-are-their-capabilities? Then I'm sorry to have been distracting. It's just that I'd really like to use some sort of peer to peer assertion consensus/criticism engine which was more durable than the web. I was reacting to this not being that.
In practice, I don't know how much that would matter. If I were the kind of powerful actor that federation is supposed to guard against, I'd use DNS poisoning and crooked CA's/ISP's to work at the network level rather than attempting to corrupt each server admin separately.
So I see it as a good start, but really only meaningful if we de-root-of-trust those things also.