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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Accounts can be migrated to other instances

How?

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

I was mistaken. My understanding was that this was an ActivityPub standard. Apparently it's specific to certain things that use the protocol, such as Mastodon, but not inherent

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for clarifying. I've since seen post that the devs are aware people want it, but have too much work with other things to look into it. So it is likely possible, but might not come anytime soon unless someone steps up and does the functionality themselves.

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