this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The fediverse is empowering users like never before, but concerns persist (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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ARTICLE of Techwireasia

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Yeah I get that but any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to. They can offer instance owners money to sell their instance. They can put Lemmy developers on the payroll with 500k salaries, or replace them. They can add things like allowing people to make money by posting stuff. Suddenly we have influencers, and while they may not appeal to you, they will appeal to the millions of people who like them on Instagram.

I may not be right about the details but I'm just painting a picture here. You are letting your dreams about a better world totally cloud your judgment here. Corporations can take this place over easily and they will be really interested in that if the active user count becomes big.

People say "then we just move to another platform". Yeah, like the one we have now? And try to get it big? So we can end up again having to move away from it...

The only way to win is to stay smallish and under the radar. Be a fringe interest for a couple of million active users.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You're 100% wrong on the details.

A few things:

  1. Lemmy runs on an open protocol which cannot be "bought", known as ActivityPub. All platforms that use ActivityPub can theoretically interact and federate with Lemmy. This means that if something like lemmy.world was bought, we don't have to "move away from it", we just spin up another instance and then federate with it while the other instance doesn't have to deal with corporate things like ads.
  2. Lemmy is Free and Open Source Software licensed under a version of the GPL. This means that it can never be fully restricted, and if corporate interests were to theoretically "buy" the current maintainers, it can be forked to a version without corporate meddling, which can then federate and interact with all the current instances anyway, due to how ActivityPub works.
  3. There's a lot of instances. You can't buy the entire fediverse as you will have people with principles.

Now don't get me wrong, they can absolutely meddle, but not purely through money or hostile takeovers, due to the decentralised nature of the Fediverse. No matter what, the Fediverse will always exist as it is, all the huge platforms can do is try to make it so people don't want to use the Fediverse and move to their platforms instead.

To try and give an analogy, it would be like a company trying to "buy the web" - they literally cannot. Of course, we do have some huge players who control a lot of the web and attempt to dictate standards for everyone else, but there is no one iron fist that rules over everything, and there's many small players and communities all over the place.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really appreciate this explanation. I was a bit worried about corporations (Meta) taking over myself and now I know it wouldn’t be a problem. I’ve been online since the mid 90s but never learned the ins and outs of how it all works especially when it comes to FOSS.

[–] Iteria 6 points 1 year ago

I mean there is still the very real threat of niche irrelevance. If enough instances are aligned with corporations, the embrace, extend, extinguish can happen. You really want Independent instances to have at least a 1/3 of the population. Threads is gonna make that extremely tricky when it federates.

[–] TheMightyHUG 1 points 1 year ago

They would just need to buy servers faster than users move instances, wouldn't they?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to"

They literally can't.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If someone bought every instance in the Fediverse, they would technically own the Fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

No, they wouldn't. They'd just own some servers. And in the meantime, other instances would appear. To own the fediverse you'd have to completely control every web server in existence, halt production on new web servers and somehow find a way to make open source software licenses invalid, buy then patent, then remove all the existing fediverse software types, somehow repeal ActivityPub as a standard and then make it all illegal across the entire world.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yeah I get that but any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to. They can offer instance owners money to sell their instance.

...and they can turn around and create another instance

They can put Lemmy developers on the payroll with 500k salaries, or replace them.

Lemmy devs don't really "own" the code, since it is free software. It can be forked at any time by anyone.

They can add things like allowing people to make money by posting stuff.

...and existing fediverse instances can just not federate with instances that push that bullshit