Not willing to give them ideas so fast.
That’s something that popped in my head as soon as I started in here, not so long ago.
But there’s nothing to prevent that, right? I mean, Meta could very well create a meta instance on Lemmy or Kbin or Mastodon or in all of them, bring a bunch of users, sprinkle in some ads because why not.
Sure, they could be defederated from more restrictive insfances. In the bigger picture, every other instance could boycott them, but they would surely federate among themselves (Elon meets Mark, ugh). They also have all the computational power and would have no problem being the largest instances in the Fediverse.
Then what? Is that feasible? Probable? My utopian future about a free, descentralized Fediverse is a lie?
I’m all for corporate instances as long as we get a bunch of them - the one thing we really do need to avoid is a situation where one company dominates the “open” Fediverse to the extent that they can turn around and murder it, like Google did with Usenet.
I’m not familiar with the Google Usenet story. What happened?
Basically Usenet was already waning, and google bought dejanews and turned it into google groups, which was a potential lifeline, then they stripped Usenet functionality out of the product over time.