I am not one for policies restricting choice but I fear the situation where Meta sets up instances that become big, say like Lemmy.world. Then one day when their instance is popular, they decide to charge other instances to federate with Meta’s instances.
Big corps like YouTube, twitter, Meta, etc are known to offer services at a loss to grow their service and then drop the hammer and demand payment to use what people already rely on.
I feel a policy that prevents federated corp instance from profiting early on from FOSS, self hosted, and volunteer federated servers is something to think about - though I do not know the best approach.
I like what Open Source software does with their licensing approach where you are free to view, use, and contribute but if you take you must distribute the source code to others. Some outright ban usage for profit without a license.
Obviously licensing applies well for software to prevent abuse, and I would like a discussion about what Terms of Use policies can prevent volunteer work from being abused - if any are desired.
see the following cross-post from: https://programming.dev/post/427323
Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?
I’m not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.
Here is a link if someone don’t know what Meta’s Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Copyleft should absolutely work. Not sure what we are currently doing, but nearly every toot or reply in the fediverse is copyrighted content. You must explicitly or implicitly give a license to every instance to use and redistribute that content. I could imagine a field in ActivityPub that declares the license, for example using Creative Commons licenses. If this license forbids commercial use, Meta can’t use it. Also nobody else, such as journalists? Probably needs more thought on how a license should work. It is definitely a sharp sword!