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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
So far I think this is the most succinct and correct answer.
In another thread I posted the hypothetical example of a company standing up an instance with a really robust infrastructure (lots of storage, fast and redundant servers, etc). They could use their more significant money and resources to offer things other instances can’t. For example they could attract big names to do AMAs, or they could create communities with huge amounts of useful content that lots of people feel is invaluable. People would be encouraged to make lots of communities there and lots might make it their home instance.
Then, once it’s really entrenched, the company could decide to start charging a subscription for access, or could start serving up ads. It could be painful to walk away from it in a similar way people have felt pain moving away from Reddit. The difference is that, regardless of how big it is, it’s still just one instance among many. You wouldn’t have to walk away from Lemmy, just that instance.
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.
And then if you as a user don’t agree with how the admins are running the instance you’re a part of, you can make a new account under a different instance with admins that run that instance differently (i.e. by federating with corporate platforms).
They could buyout instances if they wanted, but people could just moved to another instance and other instances can defederate from the corporate instance.
They will eventually start astroturfing when the audience is big enough. There’s no stopping that, but at least they won’t be able to control the votes as easily.
It’s already started. There was a technology post earlier that included an affiliate link to a big online retailer.
It won’t be long before Disney astroturfs the entertainment communities and car companies astroturf the tech communities. There is no way to prevent it without requiring a level of privacy invasion that most people would not welcome.
The fediverse is just as susceptible to this as every other platform. Now that Lemmy is counting users in the millions, the enshitifcation will begin. I just hope the communities figure out some novel way to mitigate it.
It won’t be the enshittification that we’re used to and that Cory Doctorow wrote about. The platform as a whole is unlikely to do that to us, although certain instances definitely will.
Instead, this will be more like an arms race. Bad actors (especially spammers) will try to force their content upon us, and we will do everything we can to block/prevent that. I’m including astroturfing as part of this, since it’s being run by peer nodes (unaffiliated with the platform) instead of admins.
I hope you are right about better mechanisms to detect and control Astroturfing. It is what killed Reddit for me, not the whole API mess.
If you want a Reddit example, go look at the “Naked and Afraid” subreddit dedicated to the show. Almost all the activity is from accounts with the same semantic naming pattern and who have the same account pattern in terms of age and ratio of karma.
When you look at what is being posted, it is obvious that Discovery/Max paid some shitty social-media marketing company to “increase engagement”. They will post for a thing, against a thing, opened ended questions, etc. then all the other fake accounts pile in and respond. Creating comment chains 8-12 deep with fake comments to try and keep you “engaged” with their content.
The same thing will happen here. The Astroturfers don’t care about community standards, rules, “shame”, or accounts. They create and burn accounts by the hundreds of thousands. They also make money in this, so they will just continue to optimize for any criteria the fediverse uses to move content to “hot” visibility.
I haven’t seen a platform yet that has a good way to combat this.
Not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it certainly sounds like bad actors. Where did the existing toolset fall short? Were there mods? Did they remove these posts/comments? Minimum account ages?
Once we identify the tools needed to fight the spam, they get deployed. If effective, the spammers move on to the next arms to push their wares. I know I saw a LOT of comments shortly before the end of Reddit that the parent was a karma-farming bot.
We will always be behind the curve, since it’s the nature of being reactive, but hopefully we can keep the return low enough to make it not worth the effort for most.
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
I will never stop until I win my Oscar this year for “Barbie”.
I would have won it easily in 2018 if they named the movie “It’s Hardin’ Time” like I asked them to. “But ooohh, Margot, that name will never catch on, and what do you mean you want your character to ‘Tonya Hardin’ all over Nancy Kerrigan’?”
True genius is never appreciated until it’s too late.
I finally saw a trailer for that movie and it hella reminded me of the Lego Movie. It even has the same actor playing a similar bad guy! If he is named something like “President Business” I will shit my pants laughing.
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.
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.
Yes perhaps it’s a bit optimistic to think Ruud or sunaurus wouldn’t sell out for, say, a billion dollars. But I think that it’d also be unrealistic to think Meta would actually offer a substantial amount of money measured even in the millions of dollars for any single Lemmy instance.
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.
I don’t think #2 is a strong argument. Reddit, when started, had very different ideals from what it does now. The founders did too, or at least the dead guy did, idk if spez was always what he is now.
If I started a Lemmy or Mastodon instance and it got REAL big, and after 5, maybe 10 years of maintaining it, it’s sustainable, but probably not really making me money and I’m tired of running it… And Meta comes around and says “Hey we’ll buy it for 10 million dollars so we can federate it with our own activitypub based social media”, I’d probably say yes. Wouldn’t you? And while everyone COULD switch, not everyone will. Not everyone switched from reddit either.
So I’d say it’s theoretically possible to corporatize vast parts of the fediverse, but of course there will always be room for people to start new instanced that don’t federate with the corporate ones.
It’s like how game servers used to work back before matchmaking systems. If the server you like gets taken over by a dickwad, you can find a new one or start your own server.
Technically you can do this without a federated system like Lemmy, but it is way easier to do with a system like this than starting a normal website with the capacity to handle a large number of users as you don’t necessarily need servers to handle a lot, you can just grab content from other servers you like.
“Free” is a simplification. Bad actors can hurt lemmy - however it is also easier for the individual to fight back. If an instance acts unfairly, an individual can choose to ignore that instance and not lose all of Lemmy - they would still have access to all other instances.
Follow up question - if I created my account on an instance, and that instance is a bad actor and disappears (not just defederated, but shuts down), wouldn’t I lose my account and all the content associated with it? Posts, replies, saved stuff, etc? That is my understanding based on another thread.
Assuming so, doesn’t that incentivise people to create their accounts on a large instance like lemmy.world? Let’s be real that 99.99% of people are not going to host their own instance to create their account.
Have multiple accounts across different instances. If you pick a few big ones and a few small ones the likelihood that you get stuck without access to anything one day is infinitesimal.
I have a few accounts right now just because sometimes they go down. At first the thought of having franked accounts bothered me, but without the karma system, why should I care about my individual accounts?
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
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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.
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?
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.
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.
Easy enough to switch instances if/when it happens
deleted by creator
So far I think this is the most succinct and correct answer.
In another thread I posted the hypothetical example of a company standing up an instance with a really robust infrastructure (lots of storage, fast and redundant servers, etc). They could use their more significant money and resources to offer things other instances can’t. For example they could attract big names to do AMAs, or they could create communities with huge amounts of useful content that lots of people feel is invaluable. People would be encouraged to make lots of communities there and lots might make it their home instance.
Then, once it’s really entrenched, the company could decide to start charging a subscription for access, or could start serving up ads. It could be painful to walk away from it in a similar way people have felt pain moving away from Reddit. The difference is that, regardless of how big it is, it’s still just one instance among many. You wouldn’t have to walk away from Lemmy, just that instance.
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.
And then if you as a user don’t agree with how the admins are running the instance you’re a part of, you can make a new account under a different instance with admins that run that instance differently (i.e. by federating with corporate platforms).
They could buyout instances if they wanted, but people could just moved to another instance and other instances can defederate from the corporate instance.
Yeah, nothing better than taking a million euros and then just making a new instance with a slightly different name.
They will eventually start astroturfing when the audience is big enough. There’s no stopping that, but at least they won’t be able to control the votes as easily.
It’s already started. There was a technology post earlier that included an affiliate link to a big online retailer.
It won’t be long before Disney astroturfs the entertainment communities and car companies astroturf the tech communities. There is no way to prevent it without requiring a level of privacy invasion that most people would not welcome.
The fediverse is just as susceptible to this as every other platform. Now that Lemmy is counting users in the millions, the enshitifcation will begin. I just hope the communities figure out some novel way to mitigate it.
I’ve already seen KFC astroturfing on Kbin.
It won’t be the enshittification that we’re used to and that Cory Doctorow wrote about. The platform as a whole is unlikely to do that to us, although certain instances definitely will.
Instead, this will be more like an arms race. Bad actors (especially spammers) will try to force their content upon us, and we will do everything we can to block/prevent that. I’m including astroturfing as part of this, since it’s being run by peer nodes (unaffiliated with the platform) instead of admins.
I hope you are right about better mechanisms to detect and control Astroturfing. It is what killed Reddit for me, not the whole API mess.
If you want a Reddit example, go look at the “Naked and Afraid” subreddit dedicated to the show. Almost all the activity is from accounts with the same semantic naming pattern and who have the same account pattern in terms of age and ratio of karma.
When you look at what is being posted, it is obvious that Discovery/Max paid some shitty social-media marketing company to “increase engagement”. They will post for a thing, against a thing, opened ended questions, etc. then all the other fake accounts pile in and respond. Creating comment chains 8-12 deep with fake comments to try and keep you “engaged” with their content.
The same thing will happen here. The Astroturfers don’t care about community standards, rules, “shame”, or accounts. They create and burn accounts by the hundreds of thousands. They also make money in this, so they will just continue to optimize for any criteria the fediverse uses to move content to “hot” visibility.
I haven’t seen a platform yet that has a good way to combat this.
Not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it certainly sounds like bad actors. Where did the existing toolset fall short? Were there mods? Did they remove these posts/comments? Minimum account ages?
Once we identify the tools needed to fight the spam, they get deployed. If effective, the spammers move on to the next arms to push their wares. I know I saw a LOT of comments shortly before the end of Reddit that the parent was a karma-farming bot.
We will always be behind the curve, since it’s the nature of being reactive, but hopefully we can keep the return low enough to make it not worth the effort for most.
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
The “Barbie” movie is the only allowed corporate interest on Lemmy, only in theaters July 21st.
I’ve seen your account all over the place, love it. You could even be the real one and we’d never have any way of knowing.
Does the meme account continue after barbie is done?
I will never stop until I win my Oscar this year for “Barbie”.
I would have won it easily in 2018 if they named the movie “It’s Hardin’ Time” like I asked them to. “But ooohh, Margot, that name will never catch on, and what do you mean you want your character to ‘Tonya Hardin’ all over Nancy Kerrigan’?”
True genius is never appreciated until it’s too late.
Your creepy AI picture of her freaks me out
… OK, I admit, I may have went a little too far with the photo filters this time.
Hello Margot Robbie
Hi!
I finally saw a trailer for that movie and it hella reminded me of the Lego Movie. It even has the same actor playing a similar bad guy! If he is named something like “President Business” I will shit my pants laughing.
You’re not the real Margot Robbie… Are you? 😳
Of course I am real, I am as real as the multiple “Barbie” tickets you will buy for your friends and family on opening day July 21st.
But my friends and family aren’t real
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:
Tl;Dr: we are not free of corporate interest, but we have tools to prevent a corporate dominance.
Sure they can. But…
Everybody has a price… Sell out is just a matter to get to that price
Yes perhaps it’s a bit optimistic to think Ruud or sunaurus wouldn’t sell out for, say, a billion dollars. But I think that it’d also be unrealistic to think Meta would actually offer a substantial amount of money measured even in the millions of dollars for any single Lemmy instance.
I don’t think #2 is a strong argument. Reddit, when started, had very different ideals from what it does now. The founders did too, or at least the dead guy did, idk if spez was always what he is now.
If I started a Lemmy or Mastodon instance and it got REAL big, and after 5, maybe 10 years of maintaining it, it’s sustainable, but probably not really making me money and I’m tired of running it… And Meta comes around and says “Hey we’ll buy it for 10 million dollars so we can federate it with our own activitypub based social media”, I’d probably say yes. Wouldn’t you? And while everyone COULD switch, not everyone will. Not everyone switched from reddit either.
So I’d say it’s theoretically possible to corporatize vast parts of the fediverse, but of course there will always be room for people to start new instanced that don’t federate with the corporate ones.
Switch to a new instance when that happens
It’s like how game servers used to work back before matchmaking systems. If the server you like gets taken over by a dickwad, you can find a new one or start your own server.
Technically you can do this without a federated system like Lemmy, but it is way easier to do with a system like this than starting a normal website with the capacity to handle a large number of users as you don’t necessarily need servers to handle a lot, you can just grab content from other servers you like.
“Free” is a simplification. Bad actors can hurt lemmy - however it is also easier for the individual to fight back. If an instance acts unfairly, an individual can choose to ignore that instance and not lose all of Lemmy - they would still have access to all other instances.
Follow up question - if I created my account on an instance, and that instance is a bad actor and disappears (not just defederated, but shuts down), wouldn’t I lose my account and all the content associated with it? Posts, replies, saved stuff, etc? That is my understanding based on another thread.
Assuming so, doesn’t that incentivise people to create their accounts on a large instance like lemmy.world? Let’s be real that 99.99% of people are not going to host their own instance to create their account.
Have multiple accounts across different instances. If you pick a few big ones and a few small ones the likelihood that you get stuck without access to anything one day is infinitesimal.
I have a few accounts right now just because sometimes they go down. At first the thought of having franked accounts bothered me, but without the karma system, why should I care about my individual accounts?
Your history would still be out there in the fediverse, but you’d no longer have access to your account to interact with it.
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.