The Fediverse as it stands now is super ambitious, prospering, and honestly really exciting to see and be a part of.
I worry about the sustainability, though. The current model of donations, volunteer mods, and so on is working as intended, and the experience is flourishing. I see this model standing up for at least a couple of years as-is, barring any major changes of any kind.
My question becomes: How do we plan for the future entry of corporate influence into all of this? Because it will happen. I’ve watched most social media platforms and systems come into being in my lifetime, and also watched most of their demises. Money, marketing, and ads always come for them in some form.
What’s being done now to help prevent toxic corporate influence in the future? Can anything be done? The best part about defederated instances is a corporate influence could get ahold of one instance, but not all of them. Great in concept, but how do we plan for a future when corporate interest reaches these platforms and they throw enough money around to shake things up for the worse, as it always seems to?
There won’t be.
Just go back to the Internet forums of old - many major forums back in the day were ran as small businesses with subscriptions and advertising. I hope the fediverse does allow a commercial model - we need diversity in how to fund such infrastructure. If some instance owners want to institute subscriptions or include advertising on their instances, that should be a feature that the Lemmy developers should seriously consider. Otherwise, it’s hard to scale a service like this on donations alone.