this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
422 points (97.5% liked)
Lemmy.World Announcements
29084 readers
317 users here now
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
Follow us for server news ๐
Outages ๐ฅ
https://status.lemmy.world/
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Support e-mail
Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.
Report contact
- DM https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
- Email [email protected] (PGP Supported)
Donations ๐
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
Join the team
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's fine, as long as no instance gets like 99% of the userbase and we are back to square one
That's my concern - that some company buys up some of the most popular instances, then "encourages" their members to concentrate on just one instance, builds up the number of communities on it until it becomes totally dominant and then cuts out all the other instances.
Not that the others couldn't just continue, obviously, but if they're starved of users they'll be starved of content too and the gravitational pull of the big one(s) might drive the small ones into obscurity or closure.
BRB, got a business idea...
That's exactly what Apple, Google, and Facebook did to XMPP. They all started with a federated open protocol messaging system. At first iChat users could talk to GChat, and Messenger users, as well as users of thousands of other servers. After they built their network they closed off federation under the guise of "feature development".
To this day, iMessage still uses an XMPP based backend. But green text is for Apple users only!
Something poetic about Facebook dropping xmpp and now coming back to mastodon
I can totally see the big 5 trying to the same things with activitypub
Might seem naive, but I actually have a hard time imagining this. There's just not a lot to make one instance more desirable than another, which seems like a bad thing, but I don't think it is. I decided against signing up on lemmy.ml because it was laggy, so I went with a smaller instance- all the same content, but without the lag. If a lot of content gets created on one instance, there's no pressure to pile in, because you can view, comment and interact from a different, smaller instance.