How long until we have corporate instances in the Fediverse?
How long until we have corporate instances in the Fediverse?
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?
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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?).
I am just learning my way around in the Fediverse but from what I currently understand I agree with you about being able to go elsewhere if you don't get along with some new neighbors. I do believe that if this thing gets as big as we all hope it does then the financial resources to scale it up have to come from somewhere. Whether that's a commercial enterprise backing it for potential financial gain, or a loosely connected group of donors, at least in the west and for sure in the US, whoever puts up the money is going to want to call the shots.
The way I see the federation system is it‘s basically like little states, except they are based on voluntary association.
So imagine for example if a bunch of people decided: I don‘t like how this country is run and so they are immediately teleported to the country of their choice and other than losing post history (which I hope can be fixed) there is no negative like IRL (it being expensive and purposefully hard to do).
Shitty countries that don‘t provide for their citizens would start to fall behind and fail. In a way this is happening with migration and one can hope also in business (those whining that nobody wants to work are a prime example), it‘s just the states who stop people and try to keep them captive to labor and fight and pay taxes etc.
Now in the fediverse on the other hand, it’s as easy as making an account, so if my state turns into a corporate bureaucracy I will pack my bags and leave. Plus with some tech knowhow, if I don‘t like any of the states I‘m making my own. So yeah, I‘m excited and I hope it grows!