While Threads’ integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: “Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web” according to this CNET article.
From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.
In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?
I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.
(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: “any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.”)
This is a thorny problem. I think that most instances of for-profit companies intruding into this space would be detrimental to the “culture”, for lack of a better word, of the fediverse in the long-term, if not it’s independence and general well-being.
I can foresee the possibility of some being positive, but I definitely do not think that a huge, multinational, multi-billion-dollar-per-year-earning megacorporation like Meta, Microsoft, Apple, or Musk Industries, would be.
The way I see it, we have four options.
- Do nothing. Users will bring up discussions in the Agora that will trigger votes to defederate commercial entities organically.
- Open discussion threads on the Agora automatically whenever a commercial entity arises.
- Automatically defederate all commercial entities upon creation. Possibly with an automatic discussion thread as to whether we should reverse this on a case-by-case basis.
- Establish rules for what kind of commercial intervention would be allowed. IE, “Only companies which make less than $x per year” or something. Defederate the rest automatically.
There are probably other options, that’s just what I came up with over the last few hours. Personally I don’t really like the fourth one, it seems wishy-washy. I’d have to be convinced by a well-worded rule to vote for that. I’m partial to option 2, but wouldn’t be opposed to 1 or 3.
I only just read your comment and realized you said the same thing that I did. I am big dumb for reiterating unnecessarily.
