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?
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.
Right. With federation, it’s only an addition to the network, not supplanting it.
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.
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 piece of shit 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
That would be a good thing. More instances are good. More users are good.
If meta federates with Lemmy and mastodon, we could interact with our grandparents again.
We do it’s called ‘beehaw’
How is beehaw corporate?
Please, let’s not popularize the “/s” here
I am new here and out of the loop. Can you explain?
Beehaw defederated from some of the larger Lemmy instances due to problem users and limited moderation abilities (Lemmy as a platform, limited staff). As one of the larger Lemmy instances themselves and where many Reddit folks went, this rubbed some people the wrong way. Beehaw has a specific idea about the community they want and are proactive in protecting that vision, I don’t know how this makes them “corporate” but there you go.
Thank you :)
Treat federation like email. Gmail didn’t ruin email.
Meta’s got a microblogging thing coming, and it’s supposed to be coming soon. Tumblr has ActivityPub support on their roadmap.
It’s coming. There will be issues with it, possibly around advertising, definitely around spam and moderation.
Many big instances will become small overnight, and will likely federate with corporate sites. Many small instances will suddenly be tiny in comparison and not federate with them.
Let em do it… with how this whole thing works, it’s not like they’ll hold any type of power or sway with in the feddiverse. We will just have more options as far as content, and the ability to come together to defederate, or just block on your end.
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?).
I am just learning my way around in the Fediverse but from what I currently understand I agree with you about being able to go elsewhere if you don’t get along with some new neighbors. I do believe that if this thing gets as big as we all hope it does then the financial resources to scale it up have to come from somewhere. Whether that’s a commercial enterprise backing it for potential financial gain, or a loosely connected group of donors, at least in the west and for sure in the US, whoever puts up the money is going to want to call the shots.
The way I see the federation system is it‘s basically like little states, except they are based on voluntary association.
So imagine for example if a bunch of people decided: I don‘t like how this country is run and so they are immediately teleported to the country of their choice and other than losing post history (which I hope can be fixed) there is no negative like IRL (it being expensive and purposefully hard to do).
Shitty countries that don‘t provide for their citizens would start to fall behind and fail. In a way this is happening with migration and one can hope also in business (those whining that nobody wants to work are a prime example), it‘s just the states who stop people and try to keep them captive to labor and fight and pay taxes etc.
Now in the fediverse on the other hand, it’s as easy as making an account, so if my state turns into a corporate bureaucracy I will pack my bags and leave. Plus with some tech knowhow, if I don‘t like any of the states I‘m making my own. So yeah, I‘m excited and I hope it grows!
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.
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Corporate instances would be a sign that this thing is gaining traction. Obviously there are downsides, but it would give a lot more credibility to the fediverse and get more people to give it a try. And someone has to pay the hosting costs anyway. Financing will increasingly become an issue as user numbers grow. The point where you can’t just do this as a hobby project any more is going to come sooner rather than later.
The point where you can’t just do this as a hobby project any more is going to come sooner rather than later.
Will it, though? I thought one of the big points of the fediverse is that you can host your own small instance, federate with other instances, and get the content you care about. It’s certainly not easy enough for most people to do right now, but it seems like ernest and others are working on making it easier.
You can for yourself, hosting a large instance for others does require time, financing, a legal entity (if for nothing else, liability purposes). Most people are much more likely to use what is already there unless they have an itch to do it themselves.
Mastodon is a non-profit that also hosts the largest mastodon instance, ultimately I think there will be a ton of small hobbiest instances and a few big ones - they should preferably be run by non-profits to help avoid the current Reddit situation (more like other open source projects).
There are already corporate instances, like Trump’s Truth Social.
They choose to not federate, or no one will federate with them?
I can’t imagine creating an instance and then just choosing not to federate. Lol kinda defeats the purpose.
I can’t imagine creating an instance and then just choosing not to federate. Lol kinda defeats the purpose.
Isn’t that just taking working open source code and privatizing it? Makes sense to me. If you want a Twitter clone you have that in an instant.
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
And if/when admins get a chunk of that revenue? Don’t underestimate the influence of $$$.
There are few corporates spinning up their instances, Mozilla, Vivaldi, few others for sure.
Not a big deal.
Social media monsters could either open up their own instances or enable ActivityPub integration from their main services, either way this will be interesting to watch. Any of these steps, I am sure, are very carefully evaluated as we speak, from commercial, policy and compliance, brand, risk perspectives.
Defed anything from meta or google
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.
And why is your life worth more than your admin/mod’s?
