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?
We do it’s called ‘beehaw’
okay I laughed at this
How is beehaw corporate?
Please, let’s not popularize the “/s” here
I already got vote massacred cause I made a joke about displaying Nazi logos being illegal, since that neighborhood in…Chicago? outlawed the trans flag(where I was clearly on the right side) and people assumed I was making an actual, factual argument for the nazis. It’s necessary sometimes lol
Why not? With the structure of the Fediverse, it’s impossible for anyone to lock their users to their particular instance, and if their users prove to be problematic, they’ll just get defederated.
And if someone can run an instance like a business and still federate, more power to them. Labor should be paid.
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.
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
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?).
Treat federation like email. Gmail didn’t ruin email.
Gmail kinda did ruin email though, at least a little.
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.
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!
As long as the ads are limited to sponsor posts and banner ads I really wont mind, you can just scroll past them
How would they put ads on our instances ? From what I understand, the only way would be by creating true posts as regular users, in which case most instances would just defederate with them (not sure it is the correct way to say this)
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?
We can always defederate and block corporate instances
Ultimately, that is down to user behaviour.
Didn’t meta announce they were gonna make a fediverse thing?
Would that even be a bad thing? Businesses like news outlets, media companies, game companies, content creators all have a presence on reddit, twitter and similar social networks. Having them first-hand in the fediverse would be a good thing, especially if they host their own instances, it would further legitimize the fediverse and expand it.
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.
I don’t think a corporate instance is necessarily a bad thing. The purpose of federation is to give consumers choice, and if the right choice for some people is an instance managed by a corporation and the corporation makes enough money to keep it going then it’s a win win, right?
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.
