Amoiridis KyriakosLemmy and Mastodon feel like the real web3.
Wishfully thinking, but, I hope companies follow this
MattThere's been quite a lot of large companies and institutions on the Fediverse, mostly on Mastodon. As long as there are people there, corporate will follow too.
Some examples:
- ARD, the largest German public broadcaster, has their own Mastodon instance (https://ard.social/explore)
- The EU itself has their own Mastodon instance (https://social.network.europa.eu/explore)
- The German federal authorities also have their own Mastodon instance (https://social.bund.de/explore)
Then there's all the big FOSS tech groups like KDE and Mozilla who are on the Fediverse too.
As long as there's an audience, people will come, just have to withstand the growing pains.
That's fine, as long as no instance gets like 99% of the userbase and we are back to square one
SanguineParThat's my concern - that some company buys up some of the most popular instances, then "encourages" their members to concentrate on on instance, builds up the number of communities on it until it becomes totally dominant and then cuts out all the other instances.
Not that the others couldn't just continue, obviously, but if they're starved of users they'll be starved of content too and the gravitational pull of the big one(s) might drive the small ones into obscurity or closure.
BRB, got a business idea...
blackstampedeMight seem naive, but I actually have a hard time imagining this. There's just not a lot to make one instance more desirable than another, which seems like a bad thing, but I don't think it is. I decided against signing up on lemmy.ml because it was laggy, so I went with a smaller instance- all the same content, but without the lag. If a lot of content gets created on one instance, there's no pressure to pile in, because you can view, comment and interact from a different, smaller instance.
There are ways for large players to hijack things if we let them. There's always the embrace, extend, extinguish method where a company starts adding proprietary features to the protocol and then cutting support to the competitors once they hit a critical mass.
Let's day they add some proprietary features. That's basically the difference between kbin and lemmy - they both support enough of the basic feature set required that anything they add on top of it is just "nice to have", not something which would prevent a lemmy user from switching to kbin if every lemmy instance gets shut down.
Just the fact that lemmy/kbin exists and that we are on it suggests that the scenario is unlikely. Still, the idea would be that Meta would make their own ActivityPub based service. They make it super easy for facebook/Instagram users to join. Then eventually they roll out some feature that needs MetaPub, their new open source (if you agree to their strict license) version of the api. Now if you want to interact with people uses those features, you need to go to a Meta approved instance. Eventually they disable the old ActivityPub system and cut ties with standard Lemmy/kbin instances. Probably in the name of security or user experience.