The Agora

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In the spirit of the Ancient Greek Agora, we invite you to join our vibrant community - a contemporary meeting place for the exchange of ideas, inspired by the practices of old. Just as the Agora served as the heart of public life in Ancient Athens, our platform is designed to be the epicenter of meaningful discussion and thought-provoking dialogue.

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[Discussion] A general approach toward companies embracing the Fediverse? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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While Threads' integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: "Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web" according to this CNET article.

From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.

In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?

I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.

(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: "any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.")

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You speak for me too.

I will leave the moment my content is shared with an ad supported instance. I'm absolutely fine with for profit companies joining (many aren't), but I cannot tolerate my content being used to manipulate people into buying stuff they don't need. If they want it, they can scrape it, but I don't want to willingly hand it over.

If this instance chooses to federate, I'm not going to raise a fit or anything, but I will leave, and I'll probably leave the entire ActivityPub network as well (though maybe I'll try self-hosting). This is the best instance for me, but that's my line in the sand. I want nothing to do with Meta or any social media network that profits from the personal data of its users. I left Reddit when it became clear that was the direction they were going (took me until the API change to commit to leaving), and Lemmy is my only social media (outside LinkedIn, which I only use for job applications) and I wouldn't mind leaving it as well.