Preparing for Future Corporate Influence

Unfortunately money makes the world go round. Part of the meaning of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” means that no matter who you are, no matter what kind of service you employ, no matter what you try and do for yourself, somewhere along the line capitalism comes in and causes someone to suffer. It’s pervasive and insidious.

If instances are completely supported by user donations, that’s great. But they will never match the billions of dollars that corps can toss around.

The only real way to prevent corporate influence on anything is to abolish corporations and/or capitalism. In the meantime, though, we as users can take steps to mitigate their influence: discuss proactively, agree to defederate at a moment’s notice, and server admins can refuse bribes/offers/etc.

There are some forms of commercialization i would be super down for, specifically: any large game studio, publisher, software company, or any other company that has support forums and communities, could make a Lemmy instance for their official support forums (they could even reasonably hide the “all” view from their own web ui, but stay federated so people on other lemmys can still post there)

The account migration feature is sorely needed to help mitigate the chance of one instance monopolizing a majority of Lemmy users.

It's just one example, but there's a pact among many Fediverse admins, to not federate with anything run by Meta/Facebook.

The real risk isn't really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/"questions" about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/"hey i just found this thing!" posts and so on.

Those aren't as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they're still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that's less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?

Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it's not really the risk that's likely to happen in the short term as much as "social media marketers" shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.

Nobody can "get ahold" of an instance in any meaningful way. Accounts can be migrated to other instances. Instances that act poorly get defederated.

If Meta buys lemmy.world you know what happens? Everyone migrates to other instances, lemmy.world gets defederated, and Meta now has a completely useless instance name and not much more.

Honestly.

1. I will pay a monthly fee for my share of the server costs
2. with that I will insist my instance admins guard against attacks. - defederate had actors like Meta and got farms, join assertive instance pacts to protect at least our Lerner of the fediverse

And in the end that is it - we will never save and protect and preserve the whole of fediverse. Some admins will be bought. Some will be compromised.

But we can protect a “citadel” of key value. And I am happy to financially support them.

The sorry thing is - I am terrible with donations (something something something - “everyone. Should pay if I pay” is the gist of my boneheaded reasoning). But I’ll happily pay a fee to sustain my instance.

No one knows if corporations have a way to mess this up yet, which has in turn fueled the push against META joining the space.

But by design it is safeguarded, it is all about horizontal growth, instances aren't thought to grow indefinitely so it is encouraged that people make their own instances to spread the load. As long as we have this option a corporation can't take over since as you said everyone can just defederate, or if they are part of an instance that has been corrupted by corporate instance you can just move over to other instance. This is the key difference with a centralized service, in reddit yes you have different subs with different rules and moderators , but at the end of the day you are all under the whims of reddit and have no sub to escape to once reddit fucks ip. Here if the equivalent of reddit where to fuck up, start banning people or defederating with everyone once it grows big enough, you can just move to other instance inmediatly and aboid the problem.

That is why I'm not really that worried of corporations making instances regardless of how big they get because as long as the protocol remains unchanged we can all just flee with no issue.

Forget corporate influence, how about nation-states and political parties sticking their fingers into things?

I honestly think the outsized impact of the internet in the 2008 election was partially to blame for reddit becoming what it did. Suddenly people realized if you control the conversation there you can control the conversation elsewhere with an outsized impact.

I could see the rise of premium servers that charge a subscription to offer value added services or verification or some kind of elite domain status. Imagine being on taylorSwift.social for $1000/year.

I worry about the sustainability, though. The current model of donations, volunteer mods, and so on is working as intended, and the experience is flourishing. I see this model standing up for at least a couple of years as-is, barring any major changes of any kind.

Reddit was profitless and largely ran by volunteers for free for over a decade. I believe we can do it again.

IMO it will diversify into kind of walled gardens, there will be servers that'll defederate all commercial communities and those that will welcome them. And all those in-between. And people will choose their servers.

There won't be.

Just go back to the Internet forums of old - many major forums back in the day were ran as small businesses with subscriptions and advertising. I hope the fediverse does allow a commercial model - we need diversity in how to fund such infrastructure. If some instance owners want to institute subscriptions or include advertising on their instances, that should be a feature that the Lemmy developers should seriously consider. Otherwise, it's hard to scale a service like this on donations alone.

We collectively need to do something to secure the long-term future. My initial thought is to follow aspects of Craigslist - create a non-profit behemoth that has a virtual monopoly on the infrastructure, so it cannot be displaced by a for-profit entity. No one can challenge Craigslist’s hold on “electronic classified ads” because 1 ) network affects 2) they can’t be undercut on price while still creating an “economic surplus” ie profits for someone else. Maybe this proposed organization could charge a small subscription fee for power users or something like that.

Honestly.

1. I will pay a monthly fee for my share of the server costs / human costs
2. with that I will insist my instance admins guard against attacks. - defederate bad actors like Meta and bot farms, join assertive instance pacts to protect at least our kernel of the fediverse

And in the end that is it - we will never save and protect and preserve the whole of fediverse. Some admins will be bought. Some will be compromised.

But we can protect a “citadel” of key value. And I am happy to financially support that.

The sorry thing is - I am terrible with donations (something something something - “everyone. Should pay if I pay” is the gist of my boneheaded reasoning). But I’ll happily pay a fee to sustain my instance.

Unfortunately money makes the world go round. Part of the meaning of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” means that no matter who you are, no matter what kind of service you employ, no matter what you try and do for yourself, somewhere along the line capitalism comes in and causes someone to suffer. It’s pervasive and insidious.

If instances are completely supported by user donations, that’s great. But they will never match the billions of dollars that corps can toss around.

The only real way to prevent corporate influence on anything is to abolish corporations and/or capitalism. In the meantime, though, we as users can take steps to mitigate their influence: discuss proactively, agree to defederate at a moment’s notice, and server admins can refuse bribes/offers/etc.

We collectively need to do something to secure the long-term future. My initial thought is to follow aspects of Craigslist - create a non-profit behemoth that has a virtual monopoly on the infrastructure, so it cannot be displaced by a for-profit entity. No one can challenge Craigslist’s hold on “electronic classified ads” because 1 ) network affects 2) they can’t be undercut on price while still creating an “economic surplus” ie profits for someone else. Maybe this proposed organization could charge a small subscription fee for power users or something like that.