While Threads’ integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: “Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web” according to this CNET article.
From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.
In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?
I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.
(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: “any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.”)
I think every new network joining the fediverse that would grow the network significantly should be carefully considered.
The size of the userbase being merged in seems more important than the commercial status of the service that’s federating.
Not to me, I care about my content being used to drive ads. I can always leave bigger communities for smaller ones (I did that plenty on Reddit), but I can’t stop my content from being used to market products to people.
I honestly don’t mind there being a for-profit instance based on monthly fees or whatever, I just do not want an ad-supported service serving my content. If they want it, they can scrape it.
Agreed, even if it’s only to assess the additional cost of servicing the increase in web requests. Some instances might not have the finances to handle a sudden surge of content requests.