Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
Think about email. A lot of people use Gmail, Hotmail, or other big email providers. However, Oxford University can run its own email server for its own university community. The EFF can run their own email server for their own purposes. Google or Microsoft doesn’t get to dictate to Oxford or the EFF how they run their email server; and they can’t stand in the way of Oxford and the EFF sending email to one another.
It is not that simple to run your own email server anymore. Big providers like Google will treat emails from your server as spam and you will have a difficult time having the mail properly delivered. So big tech has effectively squeezed out federated email.
Set up DKIM and they’ll accept your email. That’s just anti-spam / anti-phishing; it’s not an attempt to shut down independent email.
And this is what people are afraid of with meta joining Mastadon.
FUD
I have self hosted my email for five years. I’m a hobbyist and it is no problem for me.
Occassionally (very rarely) an email to a new address I’ve never sent before will end up erroneously in a spam folder. This never happens when I send to a business. Instead of everyone throwing up their hands and saying email is way too hard now, how about we hold the big providers accountable for their obvious bullying?
Great example. Fedverse sounds like a space that corporations would have no interest in as there is no opportunity to create a monopoly.
That doesn’t really follow. Google doesn’t need to be able to create a monopoly over email to benefit from running Gmail, for example; consumer Gmail is basically a loss-leader for Google Workspaces, the money-making arm of Google Apps.
The only viable way to control the Fediverse is an embrace, extend, and extinguish approach.
Anything less and you become a Fediverse backwater instead of a monopoly.
This sounds exactly like how they would think! Especially the reach critical mass and defederate from everyone else.
they did: see xmpp
What a great read. Thanks for linking that article - I had no idea about most of that stuff.
This is what many expect is the goal of Meta’s forthcoming Thread.
And harvesting data of course.
Could you describe in detail what you’re saying here?
Well they hoard data by hosting your emails? They surely feed all that stuff into their AI:s.
Don’t quote me on this, because I might be wrong, but I believe consumer Gmail is also used to build their personalized ad model for you, so they can show you ads you’re more likely to click on?
I believe they used to target ads based on email content, but they currently state that they don’t.
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