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?
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.