However, I’m not so sure we’d be able to avoid it, even if big tech did not get involved.
For example, beehaw.org does not federate with a lot of other instances. How long until a few big lemmy instances decide they are important enough to block everything by default? Probably not going to happen anytime soon, but it could be a foreshadowing.
I think people should be incentivised to join the smaller instances. But I guess most new people coming to the fediverse don’t know that you can talk with other instances.
Well critical mass is the issue here. Social media sites are “fun” only if there are people there posting, talking. So it’s perfectly fine is there are say, 5 fediverse isolated islands that don’t talk to each other as long as each island has critical mass it‘ll be sustainable.
Also the benefit of fediverse is that I don’t need to understand that different communities are on different instances - I just go into search and find communities I want. Yeah some will have funky @names appended to them but I don’t need to understand what that means in order to interact with those communities.
The Facebook bit is my concern as well.
However, I’m not so sure we’d be able to avoid it, even if big tech did not get involved.
For example, beehaw.org does not federate with a lot of other instances. How long until a few big lemmy instances decide they are important enough to block everything by default? Probably not going to happen anytime soon, but it could be a foreshadowing.
I think people should be incentivised to join the smaller instances. But I guess most new people coming to the fediverse don’t know that you can talk with other instances.
Well critical mass is the issue here. Social media sites are “fun” only if there are people there posting, talking. So it’s perfectly fine is there are say, 5 fediverse isolated islands that don’t talk to each other as long as each island has critical mass it‘ll be sustainable.
Also the benefit of fediverse is that I don’t need to understand that different communities are on different instances - I just go into search and find communities I want. Yeah some will have funky @names appended to them but I don’t need to understand what that means in order to interact with those communities.