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Is kbin.social anti-corporation? Should it be?
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I've seen this article circulating and I think it's a really good cautionary tale. If meta arrives here in full force it's completely going to take over the fediverse, they are already splitting the community as it is.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Note that this is different subject from being anti-corporate. I don't think there's an issue if companies start booting their instances and creating communities for their games or content, whether its EA, Bioware, CDPR or something like pcgamer, LTT, gamersnexus, etc. They want the PR and visibility on a social network but their goal probably wouldn't be take over the AP, and could add some validity and get other bigger names to be active here. That is assuming we want growth at all.
I wonder if theres any way to pre emptively stop them from taking over activitypubs development and direction
They can't do a hostile take over of ActivityPub. The trap is that they would come in with open arms and an army of developers. ActivityPub maintainers would at first welcome the help and guidance from such an experienced team. Then, once they have the community hooked, they spring the trap and start making changes that are actively hostile to small sites. The community flocks to the big site because everything works better there, and the dream is dead.
Now maybe it'll never happen, but it's hard to tell. Even if Facebook joined with the best intentions, that doesn't mean the project isn't going to be taken over by a power hungry manager later who could still activate the trap card.
Right, because that's what Embrace Extend Extinguish is.
This is why the big threat is Meta, because they are a tech company. I think any instances spun up by Silicon Valley should be blocked preemptively, but other corpora can have a probationary period.
Honestly, it Meta spun up a Mastodon site to host Meta employees and just have a corporate presence, the way they might have a Twitter account, that wouldn't be an issue at all.
The issue is that they're arriving as platform developers, not social participants. And that's their business.
We should be super suspicious of people showing up to sell the Fediverse, because you can't profit off of community. Community costs money, not generates it. To generate money, you need to exploit people, and exploitation is anti-social. Anti-community.
I say they can, this is kind of what we have seen with Chrome tbh.
Google came in, made an awesome browser got market majority and started just implementing things to the point where its hard to keep up and the various specification bodies kind of just have to ratify things that is already in the browser or become obsolete, afaik this happened with components such as the in browser DRM which by design makes it hard to implement.
I think this can come true as long as we let them insert themselves into the ecosystem. The difference here is that we have the option to keep our part of the fediverse pristine by not federating with these servers, even if we doom ourselves to obscurity by doing it.
this is the closest someone has come to convincing me that this would be a big problem. i still happen to think that the smaller instances will be fine in the long run. big consolidated instances are inevitable because people like being where people are. look at twitter and facebook. i suspect the worst problem we'd have is people switching from "facebook" to "federated facebook".
now maybe meta will be able to fuck with the standards body that is responsible for the standard. that would be very bad. then i'd be on board. until they do that, i won't worry. i'm open to having my mind changed, but i've found most arguments to be unconvincing as they basically boil down to "but they're big!"
That's exactly the problem with mega-instances. From the link posted above:
I was originally in the let’s just sit back and see what happens camp, but this article completely changed my perspective. A very interesting read. I do, however, agree that companies creating their own instances to advertise their products can only be good for us in the longrun.
On a similar note, I was recently reading about Microsoft’s efforts to dominate the whole browser space in the 90s, and I think it’s a very good example of the worst kind of capitalism.
Damn, this article's interesting. I never knew about either Google or Microsoft's actions on that matter. I suppose it's not very surprising anyway. "Don't be evil", LMAO
@Kaldo Thank you for the link, that's exactly what prompted this thread!
I think it's just too hard to draw the line of "not rich enough to be a concern." Amazon instance is obviously bad. Pepsi? If they put their minds to it they could do something lol. Hasbro?? They're greedy enough for sure.
Or what if a company starts as a relatively minor player, but suddenly get big. Steam acquires the entire video game industry or something lmao. Then we still have the same problem, they're going to be motivated differently.
So I say we defederate all profit driven instances. They can still make magazines on our instances, if they can follow our rules. If they have trouble following our rules... Well, then I definitely don't want them in a position to affect the whole Fediverse lol.
It's really helpful to see a previous example of something like this happening. I was aware of many instances blocking the potential Meta instance but didn't really get the reason why. Now it makes sense.