I don’t think that it would mean that Fediverse won’t be free anymore. With their own instances of Lemmy, the corporations could just control their side while leaving the rest of the Fediverse alone. It’s, as someone said, like email: you can have your own email account in even your own email server and get in touch with other email addresses from other email providers

Honestly is not a big deal. Some specific instance might start behaving like aholes because of corporate greed or anything else.

All they can do is take their specific communities down. The affected communities can always move to other instance (that is easier than changing to a different system all together).

Changing platforms will always be harder than just switch instance because you instance changed the rules on you.

I don’t think a corporate instance is necessarily a bad thing. The purpose of federation is to give consumers choice, and if the right choice for some people is an instance managed by a corporation and the corporation makes enough money to keep it going then it’s a win win, right?

We do it’s called ‘beehaw’

It depends on.

I highly in favor of corporations running their own instances to let people interact with them, and it’s only a time until it happens with Twitter as the leftover moderation slowly evaporates. Imagine if you could interact with your favorite corporate VTuber on Mastodon without having to keep up your Twitter account. Just let VTubercorp to have mstdn.vtubercorp.social or something. Other kind of companies also could follow suit. I have seen the Rapberry Pi Foundation’s Mastodon account, and probably it’ll grow as more and more Twitter traffic will be due to bots instead of actual people.

What I’m concerned about is EEE tactics employed by centralized social media companies to create a worse and more corporate version of the Fediverse, or to kill it entirely.

I’m basically all for it. The Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place, for everyone. Then we all get to decide if we don’t want to hear from someone and can block them from our instance, or even block an entire instance. It wouldn’t be terribly inclusive though if we started dictating who could and could not be part of the Fediverse.

That would be a good way to bring normal people closer and closer to using open source software and protocols.

Treat federation like email. Gmail didn’t ruin email.

honestly it would be better than it is now. currently content is in what we call silos or walled gardens. if my grandma posts to Facebook i can’t see it because I’m not with Facebook.

If Facebook (/ mEtA) went on the Fediverse, that would also mean exposing any and all content over the ActivityPub standard. Every user can decide themselves if they want to see posts from Facebooks servers, but there would at least be the opportunity to see the content at all.

Also it would make switching away from big platforms way easier, because why would i stay with Facebook, when i can just switch to e.g. tchncs.de or my own server and keep in touch with all my old contacts.

TL;DR Big cooperations federating their content silos would be good, that’s why (for the most part) it’s not going to happen

Meta is making a Mastodon-compatible Twitter-replacement app. The Beta is already done with sone populair influences and it’s supposed to go live sometimes soon afaik.

Otherwise, Mozilla has a Mastodon instance. Depending on how commercial/big you need to be to count as a “corperate instance” to you, there are a few more.

Why not? With the structure of the Fediverse, it’s impossible for anyone to lock their users to their particular instance, and if their users prove to be problematic, they’ll just get defederated.

If it makes money, they will come.

With social sites, money comes from ads, and ads work better served to tons of people. So, if they see millions of people active (anywhere on the internet, not just fediverse), some marketing piece of shit will deem it an “untapped market” and it will begin.

Thing is though, servers are not run by corporations (they could be, of course), so maybe it will be different. But be honest, if you ran a very popular server for free, and someone offered you $2M a year to run some ads… you’re doing it. This is inevitable given growth.

Maybe everyone will be comfortable with server hopping anyway and it won’t be like it is with Reddit. Idk just having fun for now, actually posting on something for the first time in years because it’s small enough that real people actually talk back hah, riding that as long as I can

Most certainly if this grows big enough corporations will join in if only to market whatever products to the userbase.

What you can do is to work on supporting/curating instances which don‘t want this. Try to see what kind of people are in charge and what their reaction would be. For example I‘m also on an instance (http://lemmy.dbzer0.com/) created by a r/piracy mod who I‘m fairly certain wouldn‘t federate with corporations or let his instance be controlled by them.

Lemmy.ml which I‘m also on, probably not positive with US companies, but might federate with Chinese companies.

What makes all this not a big concern for me is how easy it is for me to drop an instance and go to another one, but I‘m also not attached to my users in general, hopefully we can get some export/import functions for cases where we need to abandon somewhere (unless it exists and I haven‘t seen it yet?).

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So when I read that, I thought you meant instances owned by corporations. I think it’d be pretty nice to go to lemmy.microsoft.com and they’d have groups for all the Microsoft products where users could get support, learn about updates, etc. And you’d know it was an official community because it was hosted by Microsoft. But you could federate, and wouldn’t have to make a forum account for every single company you wanted to interact with. I’m imagining lemmy.apple.com, lemmy.microsoft.com, lemmy.sonos.com, lemmy.linksys.com, whatever. I’d like that.