I worry about the sustainability, though. The current model of donations, volunteer mods, and so on is working as intended, and the experience is flourishing. I see this model standing up for at least a couple of years as-is, barring any major changes of any kind.

My question becomes: How do we plan for the future entry of corporate influence into all of this? Because it will happen. I've watched most social media platforms and systems come into being in my lifetime, and also watched most of their demises. Money, marketing, and ads always come for them in some form.

What's being done now to help prevent toxic corporate influence in the future? Can anything be done? The best part about defederated instances is a corporate influence could get ahold of one instance, but not all of them. Great in concept, but how do we plan for a future when corporate interest reaches these platforms and they throw enough money around to shake things up for the worse, as it always seems to?

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[–] AnObscureTenet 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Nobody can "get ahold" of an instance in any meaningful way. Accounts can be migrated to other instances. Instances that act poorly get defederated.

If Meta buys lemmy.world you know what happens? Everyone migrates to other instances, lemmy.world gets defederated, and Meta now has a completely useless instance name and not much more.

[–] diana 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I was under the impression that accounts cannot yet be migrated to other instances, you can just create a new account on another instance but you'd start with an empty account without your previous posts. And your name might already be taken of course.

I'd love to have a migration option though because that would solve a lot of problems.

[–] AnObscureTenet 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're completely right. It's possible on Mastodon and I apparently got bad information that it was an ActivityPub standard rather than specific to Mastodon.

Well that shitballses some stuff up.

[–] 9point6 4 points 1 year ago

I think I saw there was a set of scripts you could use to migrate today, it's just not built into the software yet.

The lemmy devs have said it's on their radar, just not coming soon due to (I guess) stability improvements for larger instances taking precedence

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