this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
351 points (98.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43965 readers
1738 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They will not do anything overtly malicious. But, in 5-10 years the entire fediverse will be under their control:
First, they will be early adopters, they will provide insane amounts of funds to improve the platform and ecosystem.
As the platform improves and the user base grows, they'll start pushing for additional features to the standard under the guise of improvements. Even if the standard doesn't accept the changes, if the biggest platform does, it becomes the defacto standard.
New features will be introduced faster than anyone else can develop them, essentially shutting competitors down. They will also start offering proprietary services to form an ecosystem under their control.
Once they control the pie, they'll make it increasingly difficult for small instances to operate via things like security updates and increasing the prices of their now essential services. Of course, this won't affect them.
At this point, the decentralized, free, and open fediverse will effectively be fully under the control of Meta.
This is not speculation. This happened with chrome and web browsers. This is happening with GitHub/VSCode and Microsoft. This is how tech giants expand.