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?
The protocols and software are all free and open source. You can't stop a company from running a Lemmy or Mastodon instance any more than you could stop an individual from doing so.
The nice thing is that the system allows for free choice. Your favorite instance isn't forced to federate with a hypothetical Meta instance, and and even if it does you can choose which communities to subscribe to or avoid. Who cares if Meta runs an instance, or a hundred instances? You can simply choose not to use them.
The Mastodon instance I'm on has blocked all known Meta IPs as a preventative measure. So I imagine some admins will federate and some won't, and users will be free to join the instance that they wish to.
Any admin worth their salt's gonna defederate them and proudly wear the Misfit Loser Zealot label[^1]. The only people who'll federate with them are the naive techbros and those who only care about how much users they have, compared to, idk, being committed to creating a good community.
They have the right to use the open protocol, just as anybody else to build their own instance. Trying to keep Facebook out only through banning of known instances/IP addresses is a losing battle of whack-a-mole.
If you really want to stop them from EEE, make a pact to refuse to federate with any instance software stack without the AGPL-3.0 license instead, no Apache, no MIT, not even regular GPL, so they simply can't do the "Extend" bit at all.
If a corporation aims to purchase an instance, all the other instances would let them know they will vote to defederate it as soon as the purchase is finalized. That ought to make them change course.
I don’t have an issue with social media companies entering the Fediverse, at least on the surface, because it’s ultimately more users and it’s in line with the ideas of free exchange of information and content. My problem with it comes in when they try to buy instances, communities, or what have you. No one should have a monopoly on the Fediverse, and it shouldn’t be pay to win.
So, my answer is this: because no one can stop anyone from making their own instances, users decide whether to defederate their instances from Meta’s, or Twitter’s, or anyone else’s. Join an instance that doesn’t federate with Meta, or start your own if you have the know-how. Just like anywhere else on the internet, you don’t have to interact with content you don’t want to interact with.
I don't see how they can really take over in a system that's open source and anyone willing can create their own instance. If they start taking control of a large, established base and pisses that base off, they can just collectively make and move to a new instance, walling the previous one off from the federation by blocking it.
Class action against activitypub (or whoever has the final say of whether they're let in or not) if they allow Meta into the fediverse. They are putting all of our data and privacy at risk by doing so.
They should make an instance, it would help the general public discover the fediverse. Most people I talk to at the bar don't know about the fediverse, I've explained it so many times, some people show interest, some people don't see the point, or how it's a big deal. I probably just come off as a total geek.
Once meta opens up a channel to the fediverse, people will start to stumble upon the different instances, decide they are done with meta, and move on from meta.
There are some billionaires out there who are watching whats happening, they are noticing the patterns, the trends, what people want, and what people dont want.
All it takes is one clever billionaire, who realizes they have enough money to create the next best platform and be able to fund it by other means.
We are at the point where bots can generate ad revenue, so if we just abandon the old websites to bots, they become bot-towns that generate revenue, and that revenue goes towards funding ad free servers in the fediverse.
Being aware of your instance admins stances and what they plan to do. Bit rich coming from my kbin account (no idea the stance), but I have two other accounts already on instances where I‘m certain the admins wouldn‘t sell out to corpos. So if kbin were to federate with Meta and their stuff invaded my feed, I would move to one of those as my primary account.
What I think is going to be important here to make this less of a pain for users who get very attached to their accounts, is some ability to export and import account data, comment history and so on. I personally don‘t care (deleted a 15 year Reddit account without a care too), but I want this to succeed and for that it would be important.
Once this influx has died down and the devs got some more room for requests, I hope they can give us this ability.
Now before anyone regales me again with "Why not give them a chance, companies are our friends" stuff, I‘m gonna link a few things to read for you instead of replying to me, cause I can‘t be bothered to argue with pro-corporate people anyway and won‘t respond:
I'd have to imagine that Meta would be locked within their own little bubble. I find it hard to believe that many of the current instances out there wouldn't immediately opt to defederate from Meta out of principle. I don't think it'd be difficult to find a community that's blocked all interaction with Meta.