Double edge sword. "This guy is shilling" reports go rampant .
Hopefully, the Reddit bot trackers peeps will move to lemmy, and lend us their wisdom.
I learnt so many ways realise a poster or commenter was a bit from those peeps. Amazing MVPs!
And folks like kitboga taught me that spammers/scammers generally stick to a script.
Yo I also worry about advertisers attempting to target me with localised advertisements, which is why I use Borg VPN! Nice try, advertisers, but those "hot milfs" are nowhere near me, ha!
Yeah I could see myself eventually joining a splinter of the fediverse that is even more rabidly anti-corporate than we are right now. Like constantly blocking shills and instances that refuse to do their own aggressive pruning.
I wouldn't mind some of the "normies" joining. I'm a programmer too, and while the programmer/Linux jokes get a little bit of a chuckle out of me I wouldn't mind some other stuff.
That is why lemmy is decentralized, no one can buy every single instance. and even when a corporation buys the codebase of lemmy, another person can come in and create their own platform that is still compatible
I felt kinda bad for the people who were here when I joined two months ago. They had their own little community which would get quickly overrun by ex redditors. I wasn't sure if I was a refugee or a colonizer.
I feel like it's like discovering a hidden place at a lake that's really beautiful. You can't really claim it as exclusively your's but would still very much prefer it if no one else went there, as selfish as that might be
Great. Now I'm worried I'm a normie and not the "Manifest Destiny" nerd I have been trying to be.
/s
Seriously though, from the comments, it's seems like the corporate rats gaining ground in places that are federated is going to be a lot harder, and more user resilient.
As soon as a space is big and diverse enough that you stop recognising usernames or even instances, you've got to signal intent. It's unavoidable. Only alternative is to give shelter to shitheads, who say the same things, but mean them.
I think that news organisations should create their own distribution instances. The BBC has started to set up their own Mastodon server. I would definitely prefer to be able to create my own news feed, direct from source, and selected for greater criteria than how many rage clicks a headline is likely to garner.
There are considerations.
Corporate instances affecting public opinion.
Corporate opinion silencing/moderating public opinion.
All that, and user moderation as well.
A company may not like legitimate dissenters, but it might be in the public interest...
Unmoderated, it might turn into a cesspool.
So, who moderates it? AI/AutoMod? And how? What algo? Does that retroactively apply on updates?
This happens on actual company forums. Yes.
So, we need 2 lemmy communities per company? Their one, and a public one? What if the public one is being unfair? Who knows about that?
Anything that gains too much steam and mainstream attention is ripe for corporate takeover/infiltration. Federation should hopefully keep them at bay for a while.
No, but there are copyleft licenses that require anyone using a fork of some open-source project for for-profit purposes to subsequently open-source any changes they make.
Lemmy is AGPL v3.0. From what I understand, that means anyone running Lemmy (or a fork of Lemmy) needs to make their source code public, even if their code changes are strictly to support their own network infrastructure.
it really doesn't matter though, as a corporation only needs to implement an interface to Lemmy via ActivityPub protocols; in other words it they could write a completely closed-source backend to use for profit and as long as it can poop out the correct data structures over ActivityPub to allow Lemmy instances to understand it, it will work.
This already happens as we can see and subscribe to kbin magazines, and Mastodon users can be @'d and IIRC can reply to comments via Hoot (or whatever they call it). Kinda wild, but it also leaves the door open to literally whoever.
I think the real interesting question is will a large corporate player be able to maintain a captive userbase? None of the doomsday scenarios play out in their favor unless they can capture users and communities - because then the usefulness of the whole thing rides on their server being available. At that point it's reddit with more steps - they can do what they want.