Corporation cant own fediverse. Corporate interests could take over lemmy.world, or any other instance, but that doesnt give them the fediverse. They can block outside users from coming in, they can block inside users from going out, but they cant block outside users from eachother
What a great warning! This sort of thing is why I think that we should try to have a more distributed userbase instead of everyone piling into one instance. I have nothing against @lemmy.world, but it being as big as it is can become a huge problem if its interests are ever compromised because defederation becomes infeasible when such a large portion of the userbase is in the instance everyone else wants to defederate.
Google was only able to do that because XMPP’s userbase was practically nonexistent by the time they pulled the plug. Google Talk had become such a hegemon that the overwhelming majority of XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users. Google had the option to keep tying themselves to a protocol that they don’t own to support access to a very small amount of users or develop their own system that they could do whatever they want with. Lemmy and Mastodon do not have that issue. Regardless of what Facebook does with Threads, Mastodon has millions of users and Lemmy reached over 300k. The majority of their users are unlikely to migrate their accounts over just to sell their souls to the Zucc. There is enough activity on Lemmy and Mastodon that many Threads users may make seperate accounts here should Threads eventually defederate, while the users of Lemmy and Mastodon simply go back to an existence without Facebook’s meddling. There’s not a situation where Threads can destroy Lemmy or Mastodon like there was with XMPP
Yeah, I’m a little confused by the doom-and-gloom regarding all this. Meta/etc. can only ruin the Fediverse if we let them. I really doubt most people currently on lemmy/kbin/mastodon are going to abandon the smaller instances in favor of a Big Corp instance, which IMHO is the big way they can ruin it (consolidate users from smaller instances and then pull the plug). I think there is even an opportunity here to really grow the Fediverse — smaller instances can (and should!) steal users from Big Corp instances.
Of course this may just be wishful thinking. With their track record, who knows what’s possible I guess. (For example, I fully expect non-meta users to be 2nd class citizens on a meta instance…)
Corporation owns reddit, owns twitter, owns meta, owns twitch and youtube.
Corporation cant own fediverse. Corporate interests could take over lemmy.world, or any other instance, but that doesnt give them the fediverse. They can block outside users from coming in, they can block inside users from going out, but they cant block outside users from eachother
It’s not that simple, take a look at this article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
What a great warning! This sort of thing is why I think that we should try to have a more distributed userbase instead of everyone piling into one instance. I have nothing against @lemmy.world, but it being as big as it is can become a huge problem if its interests are ever compromised because defederation becomes infeasible when such a large portion of the userbase is in the instance everyone else wants to defederate.
I wonder if it is possible to add a feature to migrate your user account from one instance to another instance.
Put in some sanity checks, like minimum time on instance etc, optional application requirements.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
Google was only able to do that because XMPP’s userbase was practically nonexistent by the time they pulled the plug. Google Talk had become such a hegemon that the overwhelming majority of XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users. Google had the option to keep tying themselves to a protocol that they don’t own to support access to a very small amount of users or develop their own system that they could do whatever they want with. Lemmy and Mastodon do not have that issue. Regardless of what Facebook does with Threads, Mastodon has millions of users and Lemmy reached over 300k. The majority of their users are unlikely to migrate their accounts over just to sell their souls to the Zucc. There is enough activity on Lemmy and Mastodon that many Threads users may make seperate accounts here should Threads eventually defederate, while the users of Lemmy and Mastodon simply go back to an existence without Facebook’s meddling. There’s not a situation where Threads can destroy Lemmy or Mastodon like there was with XMPP
Yeah, I’m a little confused by the doom-and-gloom regarding all this. Meta/etc. can only ruin the Fediverse if we let them. I really doubt most people currently on lemmy/kbin/mastodon are going to abandon the smaller instances in favor of a Big Corp instance, which IMHO is the big way they can ruin it (consolidate users from smaller instances and then pull the plug). I think there is even an opportunity here to really grow the Fediverse — smaller instances can (and should!) steal users from Big Corp instances.
Of course this may just be wishful thinking. With their track record, who knows what’s possible I guess. (For example, I fully expect non-meta users to be 2nd class citizens on a meta instance…)