Why are people saying that Lemmy is free of corporate interest?

justdoit@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 200 points –

Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?

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Great example. Fedverse sounds like a space that corporations would have no interest in as there is no opportunity to create a monopoly.

That doesn’t really follow. Google doesn’t need to be able to create a monopoly over email to benefit from running Gmail, for example; consumer Gmail is basically a loss-leader for Google Workspaces, the money-making arm of Google Apps.

The only viable way to control the Fediverse is an embrace, extend, and extinguish approach.

  • Join the Fediverse
  • Pour a ton of money and manpower on your instance so most people migrate to it because it works better.
  • Reach critical mass and defederate the others.
  • Proceed to screw your users.

Anything less and you become a Fediverse backwater instead of a monopoly.

This sounds exactly like how they would think! Especially the reach critical mass and defederate from everyone else.

This is what many expect is the goal of Meta’s forthcoming Thread.

And harvesting data of course.

Could you describe in detail what you're saying here?

Well they hoard data by hosting your emails? They surely feed all that stuff into their AI:s.

consumer Gmail is basically a loss-leader for Google Workspaces, the money-making arm of Google Apps.

Don't quote me on this, because I might be wrong, but I believe consumer Gmail is also used to build their personalized ad model for you, so they can show you ads you're more likely to click on?

I believe they used to target ads based on email content, but they currently state that they don't.

These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.

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