Why are people saying that Lemmy is free of corporate interest?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Hello Margot Robbie
Hi!
"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.
Your history would still be out there in the fediverse, but you'd no longer have access to your account to interact with it.
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.
it's similar to what's happening with mastodon right now. there's something going on with meta (the zuck) getting involved with mastodon.social, the biggest mastodon instance. because of that reason, a lot of people including myself have switched instances or to a different service entirely. it's an overwhelming 'no' for corporations getting involved with federated social media.
Do you have a source for Meta working with mastodon.social?
How about you provide me with a SOURCE!
Well here you are: https://mastodon.social/@alexeheath/110596207691212890
Eugen respondend though: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/110599738227401392
And there were other screenshots of Eugen saying he was meeting with Meta Maybe no secret deals- But an NDA meeting.
Do you have a source for Meta being involved with mastodon.social? That's highly concerning because the same people that run mastodon.social also run lemmy.world.
All I’ve heard is that their new Threads app will be connected to the fediverse. Not sure what other development there is.
honestly i don't have a specific source, it's more something i found out through hearsay on mastodon.social. personally i'm now part of a calckey instance that's specifically stated they won't associate with meta. searching around i found this but nothing concrete.
Then who runs mastodon.world?
Sure they can. But...
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.
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.
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).
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.
If you have access to the source code (which you do), the only effective corporate attack against networked software is to convince all your friends not to use the software and to use their proprietary software instead.
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've already seen KFC astroturfing on Kbin.
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.
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
Switch to a new instance when that happens
Easy enough to switch instances if/when it happens
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.
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.
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.
The biggest problem Lemmy has is funding, and that's going to be a continual problem.
But it's like this. Corporations can enter the space and offer their content/servers/communities for free, and people can use those servers. If people want to be on corpo servers, they can choose it, if they don't they won't be on one.
If corporations start charging for server, then the other Lemmy servers just don't pay and restrict access to those servers, people will choose if they want to pay for Lemmy (and go to Lemmy servers who pay, or the corpo servers) or more likely accept it and stop.
But like I said the problem is funding, there needs to be continual funding to run the servers they have, but I believe the goal will be to keep the servers from being bloated pieces of shit like Reddit, and hopefully that means they will be cheaper and maybe can be done through donations.
As for "Can't they buy out." Let's say I'm bad guy business, and I'll simply offer to hire you or buy your business, you never actually have to work for me, or sell me your business. The only reason something like Activision will sell their business is because Activision because Activision wants to, or really a majority of share holders want to.
Lemmy.world is owned by something or someone. If they don't want to sell to a corporation they can just choose not to. The problem is Reddit is owned by shareholders, and enough shareholders that they can be taken over.
If someone has 51 percent of reddit (Conde Nast) and someone offers A LOT of money for Reddit, they can still say no... though Conde Nast as a corporation itself has share holders themselves so if they did something stupid (Ignoring an offer for like 2-10x the valuation) those share holders are going to question it... That doesn't mean Conde Nast HAS to even take a 10x valuation (if they think the site is worth 20x, they obviously wouldn't) but that's why Reddit is able to be bought since they have to answer to the share holders and Lemmy theoretically could stay non corporate.
The thing is: the average person with admin skills can probably house 100+ users at almost no cost, or comfortably out of pocket
maybe a few donations soo thats what decentralisation hopes to achive
One of the major instances (lemmy.ml? Maybe lemmy.world? I can't find the post right now) recently posted that they completed a massive spec upgrade for their instance. It was remarkably reasonable, and could very easily be covered by donations. Something like 4 vCPUs and 32GB RAM. Or, failing that, (and I know a lot of people will balk at this), a single non-datamined ad at the top of the page.
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.
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.
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.
Think about email. A lot of people use Gmail, Hotmail, or other big email providers. However, Oxford University can run its own email server for its own university community. The EFF can run their own email server for their own purposes. Google or Microsoft doesn't get to dictate to Oxford or the EFF how they run their email server; and they can't stand in the way of Oxford and the EFF sending email to one another.
It is not that simple to run your own email server anymore. Big providers like Google will treat emails from your server as spam and you will have a difficult time having the mail properly delivered. So big tech has effectively squeezed out federated email.
Set up DKIM and they'll accept your email. That's just anti-spam / anti-phishing; it's not an attempt to shut down independent email.
FUD
I have self hosted my email for five years. I'm a hobbyist and it is no problem for me.
Occassionally (very rarely) an email to a new address I've never sent before will end up erroneously in a spam folder. This never happens when I send to a business. Instead of everyone throwing up their hands and saying email is way too hard now, how about we hold the big providers accountable for their obvious bullying?
That's absolutely not true. I run my own email server with multiple domains and multiple accounts and it's no where close to a difficult IT task.
To be fair, the example OP used was that two independent email servers could still send mail to eachother even if they can't send mail to gmail. I do feel like social networking has a little bit of an advantage over email there, because email, to be useful, needs to be able to talk to almost anyone you might need to send an email to, those specific users. If a few big instances defederate small instances in that scenario, you basically have to use the big instances because you will most likely need to talk to specific users who are on those big instances at some point. However, in a social network, you want to be able to talk to enough people to have discussions and content, but it doesn't matter as much if you can talk to any specific user or specific account, so it's much more viable to have a smaller network of independent instances that still functions if cut off from the big ones, as long as they can collectively retain enough users to be interesting.
And this is what people are afraid of with meta joining Mastadon.
Great example. Fedverse sounds like a space that corporations would have no interest in as there is no opportunity to create a monopoly.
That doesn’t really follow. Google doesn’t need to be able to create a monopoly over email to benefit from running Gmail, for example; consumer Gmail is basically a loss-leader for Google Workspaces, the money-making arm of Google Apps.