How long until we have corporate instances in the Fediverse?
How long until we have corporate instances in the Fediverse?
Not willing to give them ideas so fast.
That's something that popped in my head as soon as I started in here, not so long ago.
But there's nothing to prevent that, right? I mean, Meta could very well create a meta instance on Lemmy or Kbin or Mastodon or in all of them, bring a bunch of users, sprinkle in some ads because why not.
Sure, they could be defederated from more restrictive insfances. In the bigger picture, every other instance could boycott them, but they would surely federate among themselves (Elon meets Mark, ugh). They also have all the computational power and would have no problem being the largest instances in the Fediverse.
Then what? Is that feasible? Probable? My utopian future about a free, descentralized Fediverse is a lie?
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.
The word “millions of eyes” tends to start attracting corporate overlords. When we hit a million users I think things might start changing.
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
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.
Oh? Interesting. Are these lemmy instances connected already? Where can I see them?
The ones I mentioned which are already existing are neither Lemmy nor kbin instances. They are pretty much all running on Mastodon.
Links:
https://social.vivaldi.net/explore
https://mozilla.social/explore (not fully opened up yet)
https://me.dm/explore