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Preparing for Future Corporate Influence

The Fediverse as it stands now is super ambitious, prospering, and honestly really exciting to see and be a part of.

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.

My question becomes: How do we plan for the future entry of corporate influence into all of this? Because it will happen. I’ve watched most social media platforms and systems come into being in my lifetime, and also watched most of their demises. Money, marketing, and ads always come for them in some form.

What’s being done now to help prevent toxic corporate influence in the future? Can anything be done? The best part about defederated instances is a corporate influence could get ahold of one instance, but not all of them. Great in concept, but how do we plan for a future when corporate interest reaches these platforms and they throw enough money around to shake things up for the worse, as it always seems to?

AlphaCenturia ,

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

chris ,
@chris@l.roofo.cc avatar

Mastodon already has solid account migration so I assume this will come to lemmy as well. But at the moment the development focus is more towards stability and performance than features.

rubythulhu ,

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)

rimlogger ,

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.

tenth ,

Definitely. We need a way to sustain this. Many of us me included would be happy to pay for a service that respect us, and especially those volunteering admins/mods. They deserve to be paid

Spzi ,

Many of us me included would be happy to pay for a service that respect us, and especially those volunteering admins/mods. They deserve to be paid

You can already donate to developers and many (most?) admins. Or put bounties on GitHub issues.

IIRC my instance admin accepts recurrent donations and forwards the overflow to the devs.

AnObscureTenet ,

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.

diana ,

I was under the impression that accounts cannot yet be migrated to other instances, you can just create a new account on another instance but you’d start with an empty account without your previous posts. And your name might already be taken of course.

I’d love to have a migration option though because that would solve a lot of problems.

Wander ,
@Wander@yiffit.net avatar

Nothing a quick patch can’t change. Lemmy code is open source and can be edited by anyone running an instance. If it hasn’t been implemented it’s because it’s not yet a priority with all the influx of new users stability is more important.

diana ,

I think it might actually be more complicated than a quick patch but I do think they’re going to end up adding that at some point, it would strengthen the entire fediverse

AnObscureTenet ,

You’re completely right. It’s possible on Mastodon and I apparently got bad information that it was an ActivityPub standard rather than specific to Mastodon.

Well that shitballses some stuff up.

9point6 ,

I think I saw there was a set of scripts you could use to migrate today, it’s just not built into the software yet.

The lemmy devs have said it’s on their radar, just not coming soon due to (I guess) stability improvements for larger instances taking precedence

illi ,

Accounts can be migrated to other instances

How?

AnObscureTenet ,

I was mistaken. My understanding was that this was an ActivityPub standard. Apparently it’s specific to certain things that use the protocol, such as Mastodon, but not inherent

illi ,

Thanks for clarifying. I’ve since seen post that the devs are aware people want it, but have too much work with other things to look into it. So it is likely possible, but might not come anytime soon unless someone steps up and does the functionality themselves.

rikudou ,

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.

Nerrad ,
@Nerrad@lemmy.world avatar

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.

jerrimu ,

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.

JonCecil OP ,
@JonCecil@lemmy.world avatar

I do agree, but it’s also had ads for a very long time.

Dark_Blade ,
@Dark_Blade@lemmy.world avatar

Wouldn’t be surprised if major Lemmy instances started showing ads to sustain their own servers. It sucks, but hosting costs money and donations aren’t all that reliable.

what_is_a_name , (edited )

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.

SJ_Zero ,
@SJ_Zero@lemmy.fbxl.net avatar

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.

what_is_a_name ,

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.

cstine ,

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.

JonCecil OP ,
@JonCecil@lemmy.world avatar

This is a lot of what I was concerned about, for sure. Well said.

silentdon ,

Agreed. Meta’s (or any other corporate entity) strategy will most likely involve paying off mods or admins for their influence, allowing undercover ads, bots, etc

tobybencollaghduff ,

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.

tobybencollaghduff ,

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.

tobybencollaghduff ,

PS if anyone wants to work with me to try and make this happen, I am game.

tobybencollaghduff ,

PS if anyone wants to work with me to try and make this happen, I am game.

tyfi ,

Craigslist’s competitive advantage has diminished to the point where people that I know don’t even use it anymore. Not a great example.

They went over a decade with basically zero innovation. Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp happily waltzed in and took a huge amount of market share.

I do agree with your main point however, that Lemmy/ActivityPub needs clearly communicated strategic vision to avoid being overtaken by corporate interests etc.

Elkaki123 ,

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.

fubo ,

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

dmmeyournudes ,

That’s gunna last all of 5 minutes once they start offering payment for federating.

SirQuackTheDuck ,

Please chat along in !LemmyFund, I’m trying to get something going where instances can get shares of donations for server usage.

That should beat paid-for federation a little bit.

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