this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Meta will kill small instances! Please read. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by peppy@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.

Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.

As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:

  1. Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won't care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
  2. When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won't care. They will use Threads because its faster.

This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.

Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That's not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.

My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.

I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.

We couldn't get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.

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[–] zeppo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For the audiences (i.e. content creators who would want websites) I have in mind, it has to be dead simple to set up, like a Twitter or Instagram profile. Anything that involves sftp, ssh or configuring nginx isn’t going to work. Pretty much, automated installers and GUIs.

I think people are increasingly seeing the value in owning their online identity - if you’re nixed by the Etsy algorithm or they or OG delete your account you’re pretty much screwed. Email marketing has stayed steady and is increasing in popularity for that reason as you actually own your customer list.

I tried to find a solution to the issue you bring up years ago when I was an admin on an art discussion forum. The owner wanted to find a way to sustain the site and bring in revenue, and I saw the problem of how people had their digital identities and promotion spread out across 4-5 different websites. My idea at the time was a profile site which would be a central place listing everywhere someone could view or buy your artwork. This was before linktree etc (around 2013) so in retrospect, it was a pretty decent idea. At this point, software has advanced a lot but the problem remains the same, as you describe. I think Lemmy and ActivityPub in general is a viable solution to that. People post on Instagram and Twitter because they provide broad distribution potential. Lack of true ownership is a real drawback, though. Platforms like Shopify are great and very sophisticated, but they’re also turning up the screws (a recent price increase to $40 a month for the basic membership, for example).

The way to get people to use it is of course to build easy to use, powerful software, of course. I suppose this is a decent idea for a project I could work on.

[–] Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

The biggest problem causing this is that artists are basically all forced to go wherever the users are, because they have to feed the audience their art. Users don't come looking for it, the artists chase them with it in order to survive. This is the harder problem to solve because ultimately you won't solve it until Lemmy is big enough to force artists to chase its userbase.

The technical problem isn't too hard. But it would mean setting up a hosting company, or a reseller that uses hosting with a frontend for one click installs.

You could add value to this with additional code for Lemmy that allows you to turn on "shop" plugins and such that essentially function like shopify.

This actually makes me wonder what a federated marketplace might look like. Federated ebay, federated amazon. These are essentially centralised shop markets with lots of individual sellers on them, what if the individual sellers were actually a decentralised federated network of sellers instead? The problem you face with this of course is how to resolve the issue of distribution and logistics.