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.

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?).

We do it’s called ‘beehaw’

So when I read that, I thought you meant instances owned by corporations. I think it'd be pretty nice to go to lemmy.microsoft.com and they'd have groups for all the Microsoft products where users could get support, learn about updates, etc. And you'd know it was an official community because it was hosted by Microsoft. But you could federate, and wouldn't have to make a forum account for every single company you wanted to interact with. I'm imagining lemmy.apple.com, lemmy.microsoft.com, lemmy.sonos.com, lemmy.linksys.com, whatever. I'd like that.

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 genius” 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

We can always defederate and block corporate instances

Why not? With the structure of the Fediverse, it's impossible for anyone to lock their users to their particular instance, and if their users prove to be problematic, they'll just get defederated.

Treat federation like email. Gmail didn't ruin email.

That would be a good thing. More instances are good. More users are good.

If meta federates with Lemmy and mastodon, we could interact with our grandparents again.

I'm basically all for it. The Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place, for everyone. Then we all get to decide if we don't want to hear from someone and can block them from our instance, or even block an entire instance. It wouldn't be terribly inclusive though if we started dictating who could and could not be part of the Fediverse.

Tumblr has already said they are doing something with the fediverse but I'm not sure if that panned out or not as I have not kept up with the news on that.

But really, why would that be a bad thing for the users on the smaller instances? If you use Lemmy or kbin or mastodon or whatever for an instance you trust you could interact with users on corporate instances without having to sell your soul to Zuck. I personally don't see it a a bad thing.

Meta is making a Mastodon-compatible Twitter-replacement app. The Beta is already done with sone populair influences and it's supposed to go live sometimes soon afaik.

Otherwise, Mozilla has a Mastodon instance. Depending on how commercial/big you need to be to count as a "corperate instance" to you, there are a few more.

We probably want all instances of substantial size to run under incorporated legal entities, because then there's a legal entity that can collect the donation money, be cooperatively owned, have a DMCA registered agent, get registered as a nonprofit, and so on. We don't want instance operators personally owing Nintendo a jillion dollars when they try and come for the Zelda memes or whatever.

I don't think the important line here is individual vs. legal fiction, it's whose interests (users vs. owners) the instance is set up to serve.

Didn't meta announce they were gonna make a fediverse thing?

Meta's got a microblogging thing coming, and it's supposed to be coming soon. Tumblr has ActivityPub support on their roadmap.

It's coming. There will be issues with it, possibly around advertising, definitely around spam and moderation.

Many big instances will become small overnight, and will likely federate with corporate sites. Many small instances will suddenly be tiny in comparison and not federate with them.

Would that even be a bad thing? Businesses like news outlets, media companies, game companies, content creators all have a presence on reddit, twitter and similar social networks. Having them first-hand in the fediverse would be a good thing, especially if they host their own instances, it would further legitimize the fediverse and expand it.

I’m all for corporate instances as long as we get a bunch of them - the one thing we really do need to avoid is a situation where one company dominates the “open” Fediverse to the extent that they can turn around and murder it, like Google did with Usenet.

I don't think a corporate instance is necessarily a bad thing. The purpose of federation is to give consumers choice, and if the right choice for some people is an instance managed by a corporation and the corporation makes enough money to keep it going then it's a win win, right?

I don't think that it would mean that Fediverse won't be free anymore. With their own instances of Lemmy, the corporations could just control their side while leaving the rest of the Fediverse alone. It's, as someone said, like email: you can have your own email account in even your own email server and get in touch with other email addresses from other email providers

I'm not sure, but I wouldn't mind Mozilla in the fediverse. I thought I heard something about that being a possibility. At some point if things scale there will start to be a cost that has to be handled beyond donations, so what in hoping is there are maybe some trusted institutions that help out rather than Meta/Amazon/etc pushing into the space

If I can still access all of that content from kbin or lemmy, what's the problem? I get their content, but they can't serve me ads, change kbin's feed algorithm, or have control over anything outside their one instance.

That would be a good way to bring normal people closer and closer to using open source software and protocols.

It depends on.

I highly in favor of corporations running their own instances to let people interact with them, and it's only a time until it happens with Twitter as the leftover moderation slowly evaporates. Imagine if you could interact with your favorite corporate VTuber on Mastodon without having to keep up your Twitter account. Just let VTubercorp to have mstdn.vtubercorp.social or something. Other kind of companies also could follow suit. I have seen the Rapberry Pi Foundation's Mastodon account, and probably it'll grow as more and more Twitter traffic will be due to bots instead of actual people.

What I'm concerned about is EEE tactics employed by centralized social media companies to create a worse and more corporate version of the Fediverse, or to kill it entirely.

Ultimately, that is down to user behaviour.

I doubt lemmy would ever become nearly large enough for anything like that to happen. Not to mention this isn't the most advertiser friendly place (!piracy is the 17th largest community)

There are few corporates spinning up their instances, Mozilla, Vivaldi, few others for sure.

Not a big deal.

Social media monsters could either open up their own instances or enable ActivityPub integration from their main services, either way this will be interesting to watch. Any of these steps, I am sure, are very carefully evaluated as we speak, from commercial, policy and compliance, brand, risk perspectives.

honestly it would be better than it is now. currently content is in what we call silos or walled gardens. if my grandma posts to Facebook i can't see it because I'm not with Facebook.

If Facebook (/ mEtA) went on the Fediverse, that would also mean exposing any and all content over the ActivityPub standard. Every user can decide themselves if they want to see posts from Facebooks servers, but there would at least be the opportunity to see the content at all.

Also it would make switching away from big platforms way easier, because why would i stay with Facebook, when i can just switch to e.g. tchncs.de or my own server and keep in touch with all my old contacts.

TL;DR Big cooperations federating their content silos would be good, that's why (for the most part) it's not going to happen

Let em do it.. with how this whole thing works, it's not like they'll hold any type of power or sway with in the feddiverse. We will just have more options as far as content, and the ability to come together to defederate, or just block on your end.

Not sure if that would be the end of the world. Something needs to pay for hosting and companies will want to use social media or may want public forums.

Could be an ad supported instance or a nonprofit with membership fees to pay for hosting. There could also be an instance for hosting company based topics and mod accounts. On Reddit a lot of games or companies had an official sub and accounts. Running the magazine/community could be a service. Especially if there were some extra tools or settings for companies or company accounts. Another possibility is having a closed and private instance for internal users like a slack or internal wiki.

Corporate instances would be a sign that this thing is gaining traction. Obviously there are downsides, but it would give a lot more credibility to the fediverse and get more people to give it a try. And someone has to pay the hosting costs anyway. Financing will increasingly become an issue as user numbers grow. The point where you can't just do this as a hobby project any more is going to come sooner rather than later.

There are already corporate instances, like Trump’s Truth Social.

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

Wow that would really be a wonderful development honestly.

This wouldn't be a problem at all, or possibly even a good thing. If one instance is supported by shitty ads then people won't go there and they'll sign up elsewhere. That's the whole value of the fediverse - choice and no lock-in.

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.