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?
Treat federation like email. Gmail didn’t ruin email.
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.
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
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
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.
I assume for Meta’s platform they’d just get defederated very quickly from others. I think it actually could be a good thing in regards to introducing average users to the fediverse (I say this as someone who despises Meta)
I certainly hope you’re right.
*eta not about Meta on the verse, but if it happens, defederation also happens, and swiftly.
Oh? Interesting. Are these lemmy instances connected already? Where can I see them?
The ones I mentioned which are already existing are neither Lemmy nor kbin instances. They are pretty much all running on Mastodon.
Links:
https://social.vivaldi.net/explore
https://mozilla.social/explore (not fully opened up yet)
https://me.dm/explore