1y ago

A general approach toward companies embracing the Fediverse?

While Threads' integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: "Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web" according to this CNET article.

From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.

In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?

I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.

(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: "any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.")

19 comments

I don't want my posts on the big social media networks, so if we federate with them, I'll leave. I'm not going to create content to drive ad clicks.
I'm generally against defederation, but that only applies to smaller communities run by volunteers.
So I think we should defederate from any platform that uses content to drive an ad network. That's a simple rule imo. However, I'm happy with it being a case by case thing, I'll just make my own decisions accordingly.

This is a thorny problem. I think that most instances of for-profit companies intruding into this space would be detrimental to the "culture", for lack of a better word, of the fediverse in the long-term, if not it's independence and general well-being.
I can foresee the possibility of some being positive, but I definitely do not think that a huge, multinational, multi-billion-dollar-per-year-earning megacorporation like Meta, Microsoft, Apple, or Musk Industries, would be.
The way I see it, we have four options.
Do nothing. Users will bring up discussions in the Agora that will trigger votes to defederate commercial entities organically.
Open discussion threads on the Agora automatically whenever a commercial entity arises.
Automatically defederate all commercial entities upon creation. Possibly with an automatic discussion thread as to whether we should reverse this on a case-by-case basis.
Establish rules for what kind of commercial intervention would be allowed. IE, "Only companies which make less than $x per year" or something. Defederate the rest automatically.
There are probably other options, that's just what I came up with over the last few hours. Personally I don't really like the fourth one, it seems wishy-washy. I'd have to be convinced by a well-worded rule to vote for that. I'm partial to option 2, but wouldn't be opposed to 1 or 3.
- I only just read your comment and realized you said the same thing that I did. I am big dumb for reiterating unnecessarily.
  
  Then we are dumb together.
- Option 2 or 3 make the most sense to me but option 1 is probably the best option and most hands off.

At this point I don't want to be linked to multi-million dollar entities who base their business models off of spreading hate and disinformation with intent of influencing nationalism and elections. Aside from that glaring obvious issue, I honestly don't understand why the federation needs to entertain the notion of needing to grow in a corporate direction. Why? What's the point? We're all here to not do that.

This is just my personal take, but federation should have everything to do with culture. If there is an irreconcilable endemic culture clash between 2 instances then it’s reasonable to defederate. Relatedly, picking your instance based on who they federate with seems to be the most common criterion for choosing a home instance.
With that in mind, offering a vote for the federation of advertising-centric instances seems reasonable. The lemmyverse currently lacks anything of the sort and, just glancing at the innumerable pages of privacy gripes and guides tells me that there may be a culture clash. If Meta joined lemmy, I would choose an instance not federated with it, personally. But I speak only for myself.
- You speak for me too.
  I will leave the moment my content is shared with an ad supported instance. I'm absolutely fine with for profit companies joining (many aren't), but I cannot tolerate my content being used to manipulate people into buying stuff they don't need. If they want it, they can scrape it, but I don't want to willingly hand it over.
  If this instance chooses to federate, I'm not going to raise a fit or anything, but I will leave, and I'll probably leave the entire ActivityPub network as well (though maybe I'll try self-hosting). This is the best instance for me, but that's my line in the sand. I want nothing to do with Meta or any social media network that profits from the personal data of its users. I left Reddit when it became clear that was the direction they were going (took me until the API change to commit to leaving), and Lemmy is my only social media (outside LinkedIn, which I only use for job applications) and I wouldn't mind leaving it as well.

I think every new network joining the fediverse that would grow the network significantly should be carefully considered.
- The size of the userbase being merged in seems more important than the commercial status of the service that's federating.
  
  Not to me, I care about my content being used to drive ads. I can always leave bigger communities for smaller ones (I did that plenty on Reddit), but I can't stop my content from being used to market products to people.
  I honestly don't mind there being a for-profit instance based on monthly fees or whatever, I just do not want an ad-supported service serving my content. If they want it, they can scrape it.
- Agreed, even if it's only to assess the additional cost of servicing the increase in web requests. Some instances might not have the finances to handle a sudden surge of content requests.

Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19,
Assuming that the Lemmy devs implemented this thoughtfully, thoroughly, and correctly on their fist attempt is a bad bet. Even their description seems to indicate that users would be able to see comments and direct messages from blocked instances.
- Yeah, I was skeptical from the beginning because it goes against the entire design of ActivityPub, so it's not going to work as well as people hope. Still cool for cleaning up your feed if you're browsing by all,
  
  As expected, the instance block option was implimented poorly. It fails to block posts and comments from users on the blocked instance, if the post or comment is made on an instance that is both federated and not blocked.
  But it will not show replies from the user on the blocked instance in your inbox.

As long as it is good for the community -- not only good for the corporations. This is why I voted Aye for Threads defed.; Meta would monetize the heck out of it, which would not be good for sh.itheads.

i would be onboard with the non-commercial walled garden. it would be a very open garden since posts are public, and that's the kind of garden i like
i'm not against federation with some platform just because it is run by a company, but am against a company monetizing the content of the fediverse, on the back of instance owners' expenses and instance users' contributions. is there going to be any commercial entity not doing this? if one does appear i would be open to a discussion on federation when that happens
that's on principle, and not mentioning the actual dangers regarding quality of discourse and viability of the fediverse that were discussed on the other post about Threads - these will be present with any big commercial platform like that Flipboard thing seems to be
i would even be up for joing the Fedipact and trying to act collectvely to protect the Fediverse

Okay, so. Very large corporations whose entire goal over the last 20 years has been to drive as much traffic as possible to THEIR platforms so that they have the most influence over public discourse want access to the fediverse.
Can anyone come up with a reason they want to do this that isn't absolutely despicable? Because I can't imagine it's anything other than "Hey here's something that isn't of us, let's absorb and then destroy it."

Defederation us the antithesis of the fediverse. Companies making an instance is a good thing.

19 comments