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?

  • Ungoliantsspawn@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • _finger_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      The word “millions of eyes” tends to start attracting corporate overlords. When we hit a million users I think things might start changing.

  • Samuel Proulx@rblind.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Ertebolle@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m all for corporate instances as long as we get a bunch of them - the one thing we really do need to avoid is a situation where one company dominates the “open” Fediverse to the extent that they can turn around and murder it, like Google did with Usenet.

  • planish@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • karrbs@kbin.social
    01·
    1 year ago

    I was actually just thinking this when thinking about switching to @pixelfed i was thinking what if Instagram just converted to federated instance. How that would look

  • LollerCorleone@kbin.social
    026·
    1 year ago

    Medium already has an instance, and so does Vivaldi. Tumblr is planning on supporting federation. Although not really a corporate, Mozilla is also setting up its own instance (which is something I am happy about).

    Worst of all, Meta is coming up with an ActivityPub platform. I am going to dread the day when my timeline will be flooded with posts from them.