it won’t take long for big companies to come knocking, trying to take over our communities. what’s the plan of action then? do we have to fear suing?
Even if they bought up a few instances, they would never have the ability to buy them all. Even if they did, you could just create more that are outside corporate control.
The Internet used to be federated like this, where you would connect to servers that hosted various services such as chat (IRC), instant messaging (XMPP), streaming (IceCast), file sharing (FTP), etc. It wasn’t until the 2010s that corporations started to centralize popular protocols into their own proprietary standards.
All we can do is let corporations run themselves into the ground over and over until people get sick of it and use stable, federated services.
It’s worth keeping in mind that the World Wide Web, which people often incorrectly refer to as “the Internet”, is the biggest federated service in existence. Companies like AOL tried and failed to make their own walled garden version of The Web.
The goal of the fediverse is to do what The Web did, but for every service online. This is something that could take decades, but it is something we need to do to make sure the future Internet is resilent against corporations and governments.
What I would honestly fear happening more than corpos coming in to buy up communities is the possibility of them join forces to lobby congress or other governmental authorities into creating unfavorable legislation and regulation.
It is nice to be in a free world, but freedom is a threat to those that want to make money off of peoples’ attention.
this is why its important to eventually move the instance to the edge, its cool to do federation at this level now but there is too much liability for everyone longterm to have these chokepoints. If everyone is running the software themselves and we are all just sending encrypted messages to eachother over the internet it becomes very difficult to stop. This is one of the advantages P2P has over federation. However you do get a perf hit doing this. We need a middle ground.
Definitely. P2P is the way to go, but has its costs. It would be really good to see a semi-federated/P2P hybrid or some other architecture that allows some of the best of both worlds.
Is this what element does? You go through the encryption ceremony with someone in a DM, it prob still goes through the server but there is no reason that it could not go to P2P mode once the certificate exchange has completed.
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I will honestly have to look into it more. It seemed interesting, but I have not done a deep dive into how it works.
ive been on it for about 2 years but only use it a little bit, ill be firing up a server for my instance this week. you can do even stronger encryption and run bots to your hearts content with your own server.
What do you use it for?
end-to-end encrypted chat rooms mainly. always been a supporter of federated systems, though was not sure if these were going to catch.
its essentially fediverse’s version of discord with better privacy options.
But you still either have to have each person ship their posts to everyone who wants to see them, direct, or else you have someone out there gasp operating a social media service without a license. And who knows who could be 12 and in Utah.
Like what they’ve been doing with tiktok? I’m unsure what spin they could try to make to convince it to be banned. That lemmy is made by the commie far left??? If they tried to do so they’d just bring more users out curiosity anyway. Zoomers have a penchant for doing the exact opposite of what right wing law makers tell them to out of pure spite, it’s kinda funny.
So, what I would guess is that they would take a similar tack to other decentralized services or FOSS initiatives. You find people that are using the technology to skirt an existing law, for instance sharing pirated media, circumventing encryption, or some other thing that shouldn’t be a crime, but technically is. Then, you demonize the whole technology for that one set of infractions. Make an attempt to ban the whole the technology, but then walk it back to just a set of regulations that make it almost impossible to comply.
They could just host it offshore then and if it comes to it people who truly wanted to access it could just use a VPN. They’d be shooting themselves in the foot by causing awareness of the public about it as well. It’s really hard for a government to “ban” an app or service online unless they’d plan on setting up great firewall-esque system, and not only is that extremely expensive but its very imperfect and glitchy due to the nature of the internet as a whole. I know even then people say “oh they’ll just ban vpns then” it goes back to the same thing above. Like, they can make it kind of harder to access but they aren’t fully “banning” it no matter how hard they try to and I think the general population here would fully be capable of finding ways around such restrictions.
It is a bit more complicated than that, but ultimately you are right. I am not really afraid of a ban but rather the soft legislation that simply disincentivizes it. Throwing cold water on a project before it is even off the ground is enough to kill something without ever coming out against it entirely.
If Meta or Google tries to buy your instance, you can migrate to another one. They can’t buy them all up.
but they have the capability of suing you into the ground. nintendo?
I’m confused about what they would be suing for? Based on the example of Nintendo, if people were sharing links to download Switch games or something, yeah then you would have a copyright concern.
But Nintendo can’t sue anyone for simply talking about Nintendo products. Forums have existed since the birth of the internet, and they’ll exist long after whatever happens to Reddit, for example.
We can just block them as users or as instances if the admins want. Point is they are not in charge. The network is by the people for the people. They can engage on equal terms. Lemmy and fediverse will only get better. Who the hell wants trackers, privacy violations and ads as part of the experience. And unlike reddint you can’t just buy ad placement.
One of the very few lessons we should probably take from tumblrs playbook but making the platform so actively hostile to corporations by dunking on them and memeing them so hard that the mere mention of lemmy sends shivers down their CEOs spines. The advertising value of tumblr post buyout literally dropped to around 1% of its worth due to the active hostility within the community to any corporate interactions.
Also what ground would they have on a lawsuit? It’s federation based, if they sue one instance to it shutting down another can just pop up.
The tumblr drop in value was primarily with the NSFW ban as this was one of the main contents.
It was a mixture of both last I heard, but I could be very wrong.
If you have a link on that I would love to read upon that.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tumblr-shoots-for-a-comeback-with-users-and-advertisers-11670620304 It’s hard to fully encapsulate just how hostile people were to advertisers there, but this kinda gives a glimpse of it. This quote in the article stands out specifically though as giving a bit of insight.
“Tumblr has always been a notoriously challenging place for brands to break into,” Ms. Littleton said. "
Step 1: Block their instances. Step 2: Meme, troll and shitpost the hell out of 'em. Step 3: We improvise once we get there.
I imagine if Lemmy/the fediverse get big enough, corps will make accounts. It’s a small step from there to making their own instances, then modifying those instances so that they can see out, but you have to be registered locally to see in. I’m not sure how difficult that would be to implement.
But if they behaved like this, other instances would just block them from federation (“seeing out” to other instances) and they’d be isolated in their own little silo. That’s the beauty of federated networks - bad actors will be naturally pushed out and isolated.
I’m not saying it’s likely or would work, I’m just spitballing.
There’s also the possibility of just paying off owners of popular instances in exchange for allowing advertising to its members and installing trackers.
There’s nothing to stop Facebook or Google or whoever from spinning up a large Lemmy instance, piling it up with ads and shilling it to their users. As long as it’s federated the rest of us could still use non-bloated instances to read/interact with content.
The real risk is companies showing up and injecting bots everywhere. It wouldn’t take much for some company to register bot accounts to any open instance out there and spam ads on local and remote communities, making moderating in general more difficult.
They would get de-federated pretty quickly I would think
When they realize they can put all the promo bots they want up for pennies and have an experience they control while broadcasting to the masses its going to be fun!
I expected there will be blocks but there will also be arrangements where marketers pay for placement on a instances pages.
The tools are rudimentary now but they will evolve.
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