Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?

  • ThinlySlicedGlizzy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    71·
    1 year ago

    My bigger worry is that they’ll try and take control of the fediverse on a larger scale. Even if all of their users join the fediverse and it becomes less convenient to be defederated from the larger corporate instances you can still have accounts on smaller instances or your own and you’ll be able to completely block all the corporate instances. But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they’re the backend of the entire fediverse. If they’re able to do what they want with the fediverse as a whole then where do we go? I think that the developers of activitypub would be against that but meta can spend as much as they want to take control of this and I don’t know the developers personally so I can’t be sure if they’d pass on that money. I might be worrying a bit too much but big tech has a long history of taking stuff over like this.; social media and e-mail are both great examples of that.

    • jorge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they’re the backend of the entire fediverse.

      ActivityPub is not a company or entity that can strike deals

        • R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          English
          2·
          1 year ago

          You can think of it like HTTPS. It’s just rules for computers to talk to each other. If your computer follows those rules, it can talk to the other computers that adhere to those rules. These rules are necessary because otherwise the internet is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, you need rules to tell computers which 1s and 0s to send, and rules to tell computers what those 1s and 0s mean.

          The World Wide Web Consortium are developing this set of rules, just as they’ve developed many other rules. They’re a non-profit organisation just kinda trying to make the web a better place.