Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
Think about email. A lot of people use Gmail, Hotmail, or other big email providers. However, Oxford University can run its own email server for its own university community. The EFF can run their own email server for their own purposes. Google or Microsoft doesn’t get to dictate to Oxford or the EFF how they run their email server; and they can’t stand in the way of Oxford and the EFF sending email to one another.
Great example. Fedverse sounds like a space that corporations would have no interest in as there is no opportunity to create a monopoly.
That doesn’t really follow. Google doesn’t need to be able to create a monopoly over email to benefit from running Gmail, for example; consumer Gmail is basically a loss-leader for Google Workspaces, the money-making arm of Google Apps.
The only viable way to control the Fediverse is an embrace, extend, and extinguish approach.
- Join the Fediverse
- Pour a ton of money and manpower on your instance so most people migrate to it because it works better.
- Reach critical mass and defederate the others.
- Proceed to screw your users.
Anything less and you become a Fediverse backwater instead of a monopoly.
This sounds exactly like how they would think! Especially the reach critical mass and defederate from everyone else.
And harvesting data of course.
Could you describe in detail what you’re saying here?
Well they hoard data by hosting your emails? They surely feed all that stuff into their AI:s.
it’s similar to what’s happening with mastodon right now. there’s something going on with meta (the zuck) getting involved with mastodon.social, the biggest mastodon instance. because of that reason, a lot of people including myself have switched instances or to a different service entirely. it’s an overwhelming ‘no’ for corporations getting involved with federated social media.
This is especially relevant right now. Meta (Facebook’s parent company) is just now launching a (heavily) modified Mastodon instance. There is a push to immediately defederate them to keep them out (Source)
There’s a good discussion about it here. But in short, if you allow a single dominant player to exist, they can effectively take over the entire ecosystem
They can - but everyone else can choose to defederate from them. It gives others choice of whether or not they want their instance to participate (or let another instance) participate in their activities.
Technically it’s not since any corporate entity could set up an instance and join the Fediverse, there’s nothing to stop them. However they could get blacklisted by other instances for whatever reason. For example if Meta were to set up a giant server and plop it on the fediverse, all the admins could collectively say screw those guys and defederate them across the whole thing.
So in that sense there’s no one corporation that could take control. The community is and always will be collectively in control. The philosophy of the Fediverse is FOSS so if a corporate entity tried to monetize an instance, other admins would be pretty quick to block it.
OK, but what if Meta’s instance, due to their vast marketing power, becomes an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the fediverse (I don’t think that’s an unreasonable fear); some instances start federating with it justifying that it brings you both worlds, it becomes an increasingly hard-sell to join those instances not federating with it and they became very niche or die out. Consider how Android started out as a nice neutral FOSS project and, while still technically FOSS, once Google became dominant it became Google spyware.
Many open source projects have died that way, embrace, extend, extinguish. True it’s hard to say for sure that Lemmy and the Fediverse will never fall victim to that. However there’s lots of open source projects that have endured without corporate corruption.
To be fair, AOSP is open-source and free of Google’s services, but said services deliver ecosystem integration - and now even core functionality, as they’re deprecating the stock dialer app.
You say “to be fair” but with full respect I don’t think there’s a fairer way to put it than how I described it as “technically FOSS”. The source is free but does it work to provide freedom to users?
Well I think we’re just about to see, since Meta are about to try something funny.
I fear that simply having all instances agreeing to not federate with Meta won’t be enough, we need something stronger to shut them out, something analogous to copyleft that could enforce a level of openness - but I don’t think we have that. I really hope I’m wrong, I really hope Meta fail with all of their endeavours, but it is a worry.
No. Lemmy (and any other FediVerse service) can be targeted for take over from any corporation. But there’s a few things that prevents from thinks like… Idk, Facebook buying Instagram or Musk buying Twitter:
- The source code of Lemmy is open. Anyone can just take the code and create another “Lemmy alternative” in case of a buy out.
- The underlying protocol (Activity Pub) is open too, and managed by W3C (which manages other things like the HTTP protocol). So I think would be very hard for it to highjack to only work for one company.
- You are right, a company can create or buy an instance or another similar service (and probably will, see Threads from Instagram). But they cannot interfere with the other ones. If the instance you’re in was bought and you don’t like the new owners, you can just create another account in another instance and keep following the same communities and content (because of the protocol I mentioned) and having the same experience. Unlike what happened to closed services like reddit that you cannot follow subreddits from here.
Tl;Dr: we are not free of corporate interest, but we have tools to prevent a corporate dominance.
Yes it can happen. But also the Fediverse gives us lots of room/freedom to just move to another instace, create your own, etc. Also as soon as it would become aparent that an instance as been captured, I think most Fediverse users would move away from it. We are not a good target IMO for these greedy mfers.
Sure they can. But…
- How can they compete in a space where people are already there providing a service without trying to extract value from them?
- Why would one of these larger instances sell out when their userbase can sustain them and selling out is antithetical to the reason they started the instance in the first place?
- I and many people like me would be fine in our own instances. We’d just defederate. If, say, lemmy.world sold out those guys would just have to switch instances. It’s a pain, yes, but it’s possible.
- By providing better services and features. Corporations are capable of providing good pro user services when they’re forced to through competition, but what they’ll do is do that until they build a big enough user base then splinter off and start pulling the same shit again. It’s the whole thing behind embrace-extend-extinguish.
- Money. Lots of money. If money doesn’t work they’ll try to compete on point 1.
- Agree. Most people will be too lazy and unprincipled to care, but I’m fine with a smaller higher quality community and Lemmy makes that possible. If corporations get a foothold on the platform it’ll still be impossible for them to get a 100% monopoly like they can on their own proprietary centralized platforms.
Everybody has a price… Sell out is just a matter to get to that price
The “Barbie” movie is the only allowed corporate interest on Lemmy, only in theaters July 21st.
Hello Margot Robbie
The biggest problem Lemmy has is funding, and that’s going to be a continual problem.
But it’s like this. Corporations can enter the space and offer their content/servers/communities for free, and people can use those servers. If people want to be on corpo servers, they can choose it, if they don’t they won’t be on one.
If corporations start charging for server, then the other Lemmy servers just don’t pay and restrict access to those servers, people will choose if they want to pay for Lemmy (and go to Lemmy servers who pay, or the corpo servers) or more likely accept it and stop.
But like I said the problem is funding, there needs to be continual funding to run the servers they have, but I believe the goal will be to keep the servers from being bloated pieces of shit like Reddit, and hopefully that means they will be cheaper and maybe can be done through donations.
As for “Can’t they buy out.” Let’s say I’m bad guy business, and I’ll simply offer to hire you or buy your business, you never actually have to work for me, or sell me your business. The only reason something like Activision will sell their business is because Activision because Activision wants to, or really a majority of share holders want to.
Lemmy.world is owned by something or someone. If they don’t want to sell to a corporation they can just choose not to. The problem is Reddit is owned by shareholders, and enough shareholders that they can be taken over.
If someone has 51 percent of reddit (Conde Nast) and someone offers A LOT of money for Reddit, they can still say no… though Conde Nast as a corporation itself has share holders themselves so if they did something stupid (Ignoring an offer for like 2-10x the valuation) those share holders are going to question it… That doesn’t mean Conde Nast HAS to even take a 10x valuation (if they think the site is worth 20x, they obviously wouldn’t) but that’s why Reddit is able to be bought since they have to answer to the share holders and Lemmy theoretically could stay non corporate.
