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.
We do it’s called ‘beehaw’
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.
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
okay I laughed at this
Ultimately, that is down to user behaviour.
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?).
Didn’t meta announce they were gonna make a fediverse thing?
This new decentralized app, codenamed P92, is still under development — as first reported by MoneyControl. According to the documents seen by the publication, the app will let users log-in through their Instagram credentials. This could irk people who might not want to share that data with another Meta app.
This really smells like a “plug the hole” operation where they see users might possibly migrate to an alternative to their services that they can’t simply buy out.
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
Do you mean like sponsored posts? If you are talking about banner ads or something that would not apply if you are using an open source implementation like Lemmy or mastodon that is not run by a big corporation. Sponsored posts would also not so very well in the algorithm unless Lemmy implemented a system for it which they most likely would not do.
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?
If they got 1 hour of a decent hourly wage for every hour of ads I watch tht might be worth it but it is probably more along the lines of 1000+ hours of ad-watching that would add up to 1 hour of pay for them.
Corporations jumping in on the fediverse bandwagon is pretty funny considering that the fediverse exists in big part to make them powerless
We can always defederate and block corporate instances
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?
I doubt lemmy would ever become nearly large enough for anything like that to happen. Not to mention this isn’t the most advertiser friendly place (!piracy is the 17th largest community)
Meanwhile reddit removing a moderator from r/piracy and opening it up again while trying to convince advertisers to come to their platform
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.
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.
There are already corporate instances, like Trump’s Truth Social.
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.
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.
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.
