this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
143 points (99.3% liked)
Shower Thoughts
51 readers
1 users here now
A community for sharing those miniature epiphanies you have that highlight the oddities within the familiar.
founded 2 years ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We can always defederate corporate-owned instances if they try.
They'll make non corporate instances illegal, or make software standards that indie instances can't comply with, or just blast enough propaganda that people will think indie instances are "untrustworthy" or something.
Eventually it will be like YouTube now. Who's going to try to create a new YouTube, when they have to compete with the popularity of YouTube? It's all centralized. Eventually the fediverse will coalesce around a few corporate owned instances, who will be defederated from any and all indie instances.
The structure of the fediverse buys us time, not immunity.
Corporations have as much power to fuck up the Fediverse as Microsoft has to prevent Linux from being a thing. They can try (and most definitely will), but ultimately will not be able to stop the FOSS community from taking things where we want to go. Propaganda about "safety" is definitely on the cards, but things like making community-run instance illegal are far fetched (in the US at least, because that would seem to be pretty clearly unconstitutional wrt the 1st amendment.).
So, I'm not necessary disagreeing with you, but I think the fediverse might be our last and only chance to pull the internet back into the hands of the people, at least somewhat. If the Fediverse reaches a critical mass of users to the point where it has become a big business on its own merits I think we can expect a lot more corporate interests from seeping in, but just like Linux that doesn't necessarily stop the community side of things from existing.
What usually happens is that companies will come in and try to do value add. Look at mastodon, you got Facebook/Meta and other companies trying to come in and join the fediverse. They'll bring the numbers and their value add - that's where the extension will come in. You will need people you can trust to in activitypub circles who can make sure that they are only focused on managing the standard without a ton of politics - but once Big Money comes in - a slow degradation begins.