In order to screw up Lemmy, corporations would have to take over 1300 or so Instances, scattered in different countries all over the world.
The second they screwed up the most popular Instance(s), folks would just move to other Instances and they could defederate from the corporate ones.
Can corporations fuck it up if they want to? Couldn't we just migrate to a new instance and not federate? Or not federate with them from the beginning?
I've already seen it happen with a company creating an account to plug their meal plan site, same thing that has been happening on reddit since it started. Just don't trust any account thats trying to sell you something.
Ah shit
Here we go again
I don’t think this will be a popular take but I think big companies joining the Fediverse has the potential to be a healthy thing. They’d have the resources to make it more viable to onboard the masses. This would grow the graph and the content pool.
Once onboarded, people can hear the gospel from us Fediverse-freaks and potentially migrate. The concept of finding and joining a federated instance won’t be so scary. The people that won’t migrate probably never were going to.
Will they be perfect citizens? Almost certainly not, but it doesn’t have to be all bad
But with big companies comes advertising which is one big reason why I'm here and not on the official Reddit app.
Ads do suck and the whole industry is a hazard, but if another instance wants to run some and recoup server bills it doesn’t seem like my problem; I’ll find a new instance with a different financial model. If they inject ads into feeds I’d want them defederated; it all becomes a selling point to move to a different instance
Do you want to onboard the masses though?
These are the masses that literally do not seek anything that is not packaged and maketed and placed directly beneath their noses as the latest zeitgeist, the must have, if you don't join you're out of touch!!!
It's not exactly conducive to critical thought processes, and a large part of valid arguments about social media being harmful.
Then we'll create our own network. With blackjack and hookers!
We always knew this would happen though.