Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
I agree on some points, but I think it’s not fair to compare it to email. People use emails for work and are somewhat forced to use them pretty often. I don’t know anyone who browsed Reddit for work over the past 12 years I’ve had an account, and I don’t believe Lemmy will change that. People are not forced to use Lemmy, reaching the maximum amount of people is usually not the point unless you’re advertising, and if you’re targeting the Facebook crowd you can… advertise on Facebook - this wouldn’t even be anything new.
The question isn’t whether or not the majority of users can use the Fediverse without being hampered by the corpos, it’s whether or not the core users can. Unless Meta can somehow force federation unto all instances, I will be able to choose an instance that is not federated with them.
Sorry, I don’t get this argument. Is not being able to avoid corporations justified because people are forced to use email? Social media is also becoming a lot less optional these days. I know a lot of small businesses that only share location and contact information on Facebook or Instagram, because they don’t want to invest in building their own website.
I also hate this concept that there is a hierarchy of users in the Fediverse, the “core users” and I suppose, the “idiots who migrated over from a bigger social media site”. Look how well Lemmy performed from 2019 to mid-2023 with only “core users”, it was a graveyard. As long as a real person has an account on the Fediverse that they actively use, they are a Fediverse user, and they must be considered when discussing the Fediverse in general.
There will always be instances that do not federate with corporate instances, just like how you can set up an email server that blocks Gmail and Outlook. But I don’t want to see a Fediverse where these instances are dead and marginalized because corporate instances consumed most of the Fediverse.