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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Technology
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If the Fediverse takes off, it would be fair to expect that new mega corps would arise out of that success. At one point, Reddit was a scrappy startup. Before that, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft were small companies that were going to change the world. Who knows which high user, high uptime instances will end up requiring full time staff, or which software tools will be used for interfacing with the Fediverse (or analyzing stats within the Fediverse), or otherwise make a profit out of all the activity that would be going on here?
Yes, and if it becomes really big, then every federated instance would find itself coping with large amounts of traffic passed to and from the big instances, and it will become difficult to run a small operation cheaply. At that point, only the big players with big money will be able to run sites in the Fediverse and it could end up mirroring what has happened to the rest of the internet.
On balance I think it's best if existing Fediverse instances don't federate with the big corporations. But there are still other ways the corporations could sabotage this place, so the developers and the site admins need to be ready.
I think that' where the biggest threat lies. How is a small operator going to keep up with the demands of a corporate server cluster with millions of users. A small operator would have to defederate. That puts us back to the crux of the original question, should corpos be allowed on the Fediverse. Why not save everyone the circle jerk and blacklist them from the start.
A secondary threat is corporate sabotage of the ActivityPub protocol. They already have a track record of doing that to free and open standards.