Never thought I would get emotional about losing an app
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Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 166 points – I was with Reddit for 12 years and bounced between Rif and Apollo, I am sad I am losing both
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History repeats itself. The fediverse is going to go downhill too once it gets big enough for corporations to notice it. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Except the code is open source, no matter how many corps invade the Fediverse, there will always be an option.
Eh, don't be so sure.
Email is often drawn as something similar to the fediverse. ... but if you've ever tried to run a small Mailserver, you'll quickly find that "the big corps" have created a walled garden that'll keep the "small fish" out.
It's all based on what the big players view as your "reputation". This is based on proprietary metrics (usually how many emails you send), but your reputation will determine if the email is delivered or not.
You can find more information here.
... but the point is that one big corps consolidate and reach the size (in terms of traffic/content) like Hotmail, Gmail, yahoo, etc - they will not hesitate to squeeze out the smaller fediverse fish to force them into paying to use the bigger pond.
Sadly ... this is just business as usual.
Sure, but it'll be the same story all over again. The big platform will be ruined and the alternative option will be smaller and therefore not as good (since user base directly contributes to quality when it comes to community-based platforms; it's the users who post all the content, so fewer users = less content).
And users will facilitate that process by glomming on to certain instances thinking that it matters to which they belong
Well if instances keep defederating each other, it does matter. Plus there's the question of stability. Sure, you could make your account on some tiny niche instance, but what if the guy running it decides he's had enough and terminates it? What happens to your account, your post history?
If you care about your account and your post history, you're free to run you own instance. People are also working on mechanisms to sync community subscriptions between accounts, which would at least help the UX navigating multiple accounts. Lemmy also has an API that I'm sure users will be looking to create services to backup your content as well, if something like that doesn't already exist.
As for defederation, I'm only aware of these major reasons and all of them are legitimate:
The only thing a giant corporation could do is muddy the waters, but people who care about the future of Lemmy are working to prevent that https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/fedipact-blocking-meta/
I've been pondering this very reason. It's compelling for me to make my own instance so I have my own little slice of fediverse to call my own, and have access to the greater picture of it too.