Not willing to give them ideas so fast.
That’s something that popped in my head as soon as I started in here, not so long ago.
But there’s nothing to prevent that, right? I mean, Meta could very well create a meta instance on Lemmy or Kbin or Mastodon or in all of them, bring a bunch of users, sprinkle in some ads because why not.
Sure, they could be defederated from more restrictive insfances. In the bigger picture, every other instance could boycott them, but they would surely federate among themselves (Elon meets Mark, ugh). They also have all the computational power and would have no problem being the largest instances in the Fediverse.
Then what? Is that feasible? Probable? My utopian future about a free, descentralized Fediverse is a lie?
Honestly is not a big deal. Some specific instance might start behaving like aholes because of corporate greed or anything else.
All they can do is take their specific communities down. The affected communities can always move to other instance (that is easier than changing to a different system all together).
Changing platforms will always be harder than just switch instance because you instance changed the rules on you.
The word “millions of eyes” tends to start attracting corporate overlords. When we hit a million users I think things might start changing.
Most certainly if this grows big enough corporations will join in if only to market whatever products to the userbase.
What you can do is to work on supporting/curating instances which don‘t want this. Try to see what kind of people are in charge and what their reaction would be. For example I‘m also on an instance (http://lemmy.dbzer0.com/) created by a r/piracy mod who I‘m fairly certain wouldn‘t federate with corporations or let his instance be controlled by them.
Lemmy.ml which I‘m also on, probably not positive with US companies, but might federate with Chinese companies.
What makes all this not a big concern for me is how easy it is for me to drop an instance and go to another one, but I‘m also not attached to my users in general, hopefully we can get some export/import functions for cases where we need to abandon somewhere (unless it exists and I haven‘t seen it yet?).
We do it’s called ‘beehaw’
How is beehaw corporate?
Please, let’s not popularize the “/s” here
If I can still access all of that content from kbin or lemmy, what’s the problem? I get their content, but they can’t serve me ads, change kbin’s feed algorithm, or have control over anything outside their one instance.
I agree. If one doesn’t want to see their content, just block it. Of course their content itself would be ads.
I mean, they could probably still serve ads disguised as content - just send it along with the “genuine” posts without differentiating. That said, at least I can block their content from showing in my feed if I want to.
I’m all for it.
We probably want all instances of substantial size to run under incorporated legal entities, because then there’s a legal entity that can collect the donation money, be cooperatively owned, have a DMCA registered agent, get registered as a nonprofit, and so on. We don’t want instance operators personally owing Nintendo a jillion dollars when they try and come for the Zelda memes or whatever.
I don’t think the important line here is individual vs. legal fiction, it’s whose interests (users vs. owners) the instance is set up to serve.
So when I read that, I thought you meant instances owned by corporations. I think it’d be pretty nice to go to lemmy.microsoft.com and they’d have groups for all the Microsoft products where users could get support, learn about updates, etc. And you’d know it was an official community because it was hosted by Microsoft. But you could federate, and wouldn’t have to make a forum account for every single company you wanted to interact with. I’m imagining lemmy.apple.com, lemmy.microsoft.com, lemmy.sonos.com, lemmy.linksys.com, whatever. I’d like that.
I don’t think that it would mean that Fediverse won’t be free anymore. With their own instances of Lemmy, the corporations could just control their side while leaving the rest of the Fediverse alone. It’s, as someone said, like email: you can have your own email account in even your own email server and get in touch with other email addresses from other email providers
honestly it would be better than it is now. currently content is in what we call silos or walled gardens. if my grandma posts to Facebook i can’t see it because I’m not with Facebook.
If Facebook (/ mEtA) went on the Fediverse, that would also mean exposing any and all content over the ActivityPub standard. Every user can decide themselves if they want to see posts from Facebooks servers, but there would at least be the opportunity to see the content at all.
Also it would make switching away from big platforms way easier, because why would i stay with Facebook, when i can just switch to e.g. tchncs.de or my own server and keep in touch with all my old contacts.
TL;DR Big cooperations federating their content silos would be good, that’s why (for the most part) it’s not going to happen
It depends on.
I highly in favor of corporations running their own instances to let people interact with them, and it’s only a time until it happens with Twitter as the leftover moderation slowly evaporates. Imagine if you could interact with your favorite corporate VTuber on Mastodon without having to keep up your Twitter account. Just let VTubercorp to have mstdn.vtubercorp.social or something. Other kind of companies also could follow suit. I have seen the Rapberry Pi Foundation’s Mastodon account, and probably it’ll grow as more and more Twitter traffic will be due to bots instead of actual people.
What I’m concerned about is EEE tactics employed by centralized social media companies to create a worse and more corporate version of the Fediverse, or to kill it entirely.
Not going to happen, they would also likely be defederated by everyone.
If there’s money to be made, it’s an inevitability.
If, but… There isn’t, if you make ads and spam you get defederated
Didn’t meta announce they were gonna make a fediverse thing?
Treat federation like email. Gmail didn’t ruin email.
If it makes money, they will come.
With social sites, money comes from ads, and ads work better served to tons of people. So, if they see millions of people active (anywhere on the internet, not just fediverse), some “marketing genius” will deem it an “untapped market” and it will begin.
Thing is though, servers are not run by corporations (they could be, of course), so maybe it will be different. But be honest, if you ran a very popular server for free, and someone offered you $2M a year to run some ads… you’re doing it. This is inevitable given growth.
Maybe everyone will be comfortable with server hopping anyway and it won’t be like it is with Reddit. Idk just having fun for now, actually posting on something for the first time in years because it’s small enough that real people actually talk back hah, riding that as long as I can
Tumblr has already said they are doing something with the fediverse but I’m not sure if that panned out or not as I have not kept up with the news on that.
But really, why would that be a bad thing for the users on the smaller instances? If you use Lemmy or kbin or mastodon or whatever for an instance you trust you could interact with users on corporate instances without having to sell your soul to Zuck. I personally don’t see it a a bad thing.
The ads! Just wait for the ads!
Who cares? If it helps the instance sustain itself long term, then they should get those dollars
Blocking ads isn’t about the dollars, it is about the malware and tracking and the waste of lifetime.
As long as the ads are limited to sponsor posts and banner ads I really wont mind, you can just scroll past them
Meta is making a Mastodon-compatible Twitter-replacement app. The Beta is already done with sone populair influences and it’s supposed to go live sometimes soon afaik.
Otherwise, Mozilla has a Mastodon instance. Depending on how commercial/big you need to be to count as a “corperate instance” to you, there are a few more.
