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What I would honestly fear happening more than corpos coming in to buy up communities is the possibility of them join forces to lobby congress or other governmental authorities into creating unfavorable legislation and regulation.
It is nice to be in a free world, but freedom is a threat to those that want to make money off of peoples' attention.
this is why its important to eventually move the instance to the edge, its cool to do federation at this level now but there is too much liability for everyone longterm to have these chokepoints. If everyone is running the software themselves and we are all just sending encrypted messages to eachother over the internet it becomes very difficult to stop. This is one of the advantages P2P has over federation. However you do get a perf hit doing this. We need a middle ground.
Definitely. P2P is the way to go, but has its costs. It would be really good to see a semi-federated/P2P hybrid or some other architecture that allows some of the best of both worlds.
Is this what element does? You go through the encryption ceremony with someone in a DM, it prob still goes through the server but there is no reason that it could not go to P2P mode once the certificate exchange has completed.
I will honestly have to look into it more. It seemed interesting, but I have not done a deep dive into how it works.
ive been on it for about 2 years but only use it a little bit, ill be firing up a server for my instance this week. you can do even stronger encryption and run bots to your hearts content with your own server.
Like what they've been doing with tiktok? I'm unsure what spin they could try to make to convince it to be banned. That lemmy is made by the commie far left???? If they tried to do so they'd just bring more users out curiosity anyway. Zoomers have a penchant for doing the exact opposite of what right wing law makers tell them to out of pure spite, it's kinda funny.
So, what I would guess is that they would take a similar tack to other decentralized services or FOSS initiatives. You find people that are using the technology to skirt an existing law, for instance sharing pirated media, circumventing encryption, or some other thing that shouldn't be a crime, but technically is. Then, you demonize the whole technology for that one set of infractions. Make an attempt to ban the whole the technology, but then walk it back to just a set of regulations that make it almost impossible to comply.
Even if they bought up a few instances, they would never have the ability to buy them all. Even if they did, you could just create more that are outside corporate control.
The Internet used to be federated like this, where you would connect to servers that hosted various services such as chat (IRC), instant messaging (XMPP), streaming (IceCast), file sharing (FTP), etc. It wasn't until the 2010s that corporations started to centralize popular protocols into their own proprietary standards.
All we can do is let corporations run themselves into the ground over and over until people get sick of it and use stable, federated services.
It's worth keeping in mind that the World Wide Web, which people often incorrectly refer to as "the Internet", is the biggest federated service in existence. Companies like AOL tried and failed to make their own walled garden version of The Web.
The goal of the fediverse is to do what The Web did, but for every service online. This is something that could take decades, but it is something we need to do to make sure the future Internet is resilent against corporations and governments.
There's nothing to stop Facebook or Google or whoever from spinning up a large Lemmy instance, piling it up with ads and shilling it to their users. As long as it's federated the rest of us could still use non-bloated instances to read/interact with content.
The real risk is companies showing up and injecting bots everywhere. It wouldn't take much for some company to register bot accounts to any open instance out there and spam ads on local and remote communities, making moderating in general more difficult.
When they realize they can put all the promo bots they want up for pennies and have an experience they control while broadcasting to the masses its going to be fun!
I expected there will be blocks but there will also be arrangements where marketers pay for placement on a instances pages.
The tools are rudimentary now but they will evolve.
If Meta or Google tries to buy your instance, you can migrate to another one. They can't buy them all up.
but they have the capability of suing you into the ground. nintendo?
I'm confused about what they would be suing for? Based on the example of Nintendo, if people were sharing links to download Switch games or something, yeah then you would have a copyright concern.
But Nintendo can't sue anyone for simply talking about Nintendo products. Forums have existed since the birth of the internet, and they'll exist long after whatever happens to Reddit, for example.
