The Fediverse as it stands now is super ambitious, prospering, and honestly really exciting to see and be a part of.
I worry about the sustainability, though. The current model of donations, volunteer mods, and so on is working as intended, and the experience is flourishing. I see this model standing up for at least a couple of years as-is, barring any major changes of any kind.
My question becomes: How do we plan for the future entry of corporate influence into all of this? Because it will happen. I’ve watched most social media platforms and systems come into being in my lifetime, and also watched most of their demises. Money, marketing, and ads always come for them in some form.
What’s being done now to help prevent toxic corporate influence in the future? Can anything be done? The best part about defederated instances is a corporate influence could get ahold of one instance, but not all of them. Great in concept, but how do we plan for a future when corporate interest reaches these platforms and they throw enough money around to shake things up for the worse, as it always seems to?
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The account migration feature is sorely needed to help mitigate the chance of one instance monopolizing a majority of Lemmy users.
I could see the rise of premium servers that charge a subscription to offer value added services or verification or some kind of elite domain status. Imagine being on taylorSwift.social for $1000/year.
The real risk isn’t really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/“questions” about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/“hey i just found this thing!” posts and so on.
Those aren’t as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they’re still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that’s less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?
Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it’s not really the risk that’s likely to happen in the short term as much as “social media marketers” shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.
We collectively need to do something to secure the long-term future. My initial thought is to follow aspects of Craigslist - create a non-profit behemoth that has a virtual monopoly on the infrastructure, so it cannot be displaced by a for-profit entity. No one can challenge Craigslist’s hold on “electronic classified ads” because 1 ) network affects 2) they can’t be undercut on price while still creating an “economic surplus” ie profits for someone else. Maybe this proposed organization could charge a small subscription fee for power users or something like that.
Craigslist’s competitive advantage has diminished to the point where people that I know don’t even use it anymore. Not a great example.
They went over a decade with basically zero innovation. Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp happily waltzed in and took a huge amount of market share.
I do agree with your main point however, that Lemmy/ActivityPub needs clearly communicated strategic vision to avoid being overtaken by corporate interests etc.
No one knows if corporations have a way to mess this up yet, which has in turn fueled the push against META joining the space.
But by design it is safeguarded, it is all about horizontal growth, instances aren’t thought to grow indefinitely so it is encouraged that people make their own instances to spread the load. As long as we have this option a corporation can’t take over since as you said everyone can just defederate, or if they are part of an instance that has been corrupted by corporate instance you can just move over to other instance. This is the key difference with a centralized service, in reddit yes you have different subs with different rules and moderators , but at the end of the day you are all under the whims of reddit and have no sub to escape to once reddit fucks ip. Here if the equivalent of reddit where to fuck up, start banning people or defederating with everyone once it grows big enough, you can just move to other instance inmediatly and aboid the problem.
That is why I’m not really that worried of corporations making instances regardless of how big they get because as long as the protocol remains unchanged we can all just flee with no issue.
Unfortunately money makes the world go round. Part of the meaning of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” means that no matter who you are, no matter what kind of service you employ, no matter what you try and do for yourself, somewhere along the line capitalism comes in and causes someone to suffer. It’s pervasive and insidious.
If instances are completely supported by user donations, that’s great. But they will never match the billions of dollars that corps can toss around.
The only real way to prevent corporate influence on anything is to abolish corporations and/or capitalism. In the meantime, though, we as users can take steps to mitigate their influence: discuss proactively, agree to defederate at a moment’s notice, and server admins can refuse bribes/offers/etc.
There is no ethical consumption. State-run institutions are historically far worse for their users and good luck having any type of consistent strategic vision without some type of organizational structure. Non-profits like Wikimedia Foundation are by and large the way to go for future and sustained platform support. Yes, that is still capitalism. It is capitalism without the profit motive.
Can you actually have capitalism without the profit motive? I am skeptical.
Unless you believe that people are solely motivated by money, absolutely. I do believe that the entire basis behind most left-leaning ideologies supports the idea that they are not.
There are some forms of commercialization i would be super down for, specifically: any large game studio, publisher, software company, or any other company that has support forums and communities, could make a Lemmy instance for their official support forums (they could even reasonably hide the “all” view from their own web ui, but stay federated so people on other lemmys can still post there)
