Discussion topic for you all, I’m curious to hear everyone’s thoughts on this!
The question: is there a good way for companies to federate and participate in the fediverse?
While the early fediverse has been fun and ‘old internet’ feeling, I’m sure most of us recognize (especially with IG Threads coming out) that it’s only a matter of time before companies start wanting a slice of the action.
While there is a ton of potential for abuse/EEE, there are also some big benefits that could come with a more widespread adoption. Is there a model that could work for everyone? And if so, how could we get there?
Companies can host Mastodon (or Lemmy or whatever) on their own domain. That way they have control over the instance and it implicitly verifies their account as official. Raspberry Pi already do this (raspberrypi.social).
I keep seeing that acronym EEE, forgive my ignorance but what does it mean in this context?
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Basically pretend to support the platform, pull users over to your product by building a bunch of cool features, then when you hit critical mass end cross-compatibility/support for the original platform.
It is, but it’s not likely as lots of them are in it only for the money.
I think the best we can hope for in the long-term is an email-like adoption.
Individuals self-hosting major servers on donation money is not sustainable. This sucks for the people for whom this is “what Lemmy is”, but it’s the truth. There will come a time when Lemmy-at-large gets so big that Lemmy.world has to close (or de-federate), as users and content will outgrow voluntary revenue.
What we can hope for is that Lemmy is not taken over by one huge corporate instance, but instead 3-4 competing, inter-federated corporate instances. A Meta instance, a Google instance, and a Bytedance instance, for example. In addition to these, smaller (non-social-media) companies and institutions (game companies, universities, political organizations, etc.) would run their own Lemmy instances for the benefit of their members and users.
I’ve been arguing that Lemmy needs to become distributed a la BitTorrent to be sustainable. If regular users are participating in small pieces of hosting so that it’s completely decentralized and load is taken off the instance servers, it would be sustainable.
Something like this or freenet’s design would be interesting, but it lacks control by design. Data is involuntarily hosted on the user’s provided space and retrieved ad-hoc by other users. It does tend to suffer from a number of problems though, lost data when hosts are offline, bottlenecks in bamdwidth, particularly freenet that chains connections, and the ‘I don’t want to support that content’ aspect being largely out of the user control.
I suppose it could be opt in for the end users - say they host the communities they participate in only (i.e somebody likes 3D Printing and coffee, but maybe not porn or politics).
Much like what has happened to the internet over the past 20 years. If the fediverse survives long enough I don’t doubt this would be the eventual outcome. I wonder though, if federal clusters like lemmy.world & it’s federation could get big enough to secure a permanent prominent place in the fediverse?
I think this is very hard at this point. Manny Fediverse communities are quite small and fear that their community will be flooded with content from any external platform. We even saw this when a lot of Reddit users came over to Lemmy. So in those cases there will be a lot of distrust.
Smaller companies could easily use a more strictly controlled* Lemmy instance to provide a space for their community. That would allow people to interact with that community without having to setup a new account. *Tightly moderated and limited to admin created communities.
But anything large will just be distrusted as long as the platform is much larger than large Fediverse instances. Maybe EU law could help to protect the Fediverse from EEE. But EU law also moves slow, and we don’t want laws slowing down the growth of the Fediverse either.
I think the Fediverse should be seen as two distinct parts: one that hosts user accounts and provides a user interface, and one that publishes content and provides discussion space.
Ideally, the first would remain independent from major companies, while the second would become universal for all web content.
I think it could work if companies followed EEE but just stopped at the 2nd E. They should only embrace and extend and the extensions they implement should be available for everyone. But that’s probably more of a pipe dream than anything.
