if one large instance (such as Lemmy.world) were to get taken over by filthy capitalists, someone could simply make a new, separate instance and choose not to federate with Lemmy world.
Websites get traded on the backend regularly without hemorrhaging their userbases. A large site is going to have a degree of inertia. People aren’t going to all simultaneously pick up out of .world and go to .world2 because someone on le.mee or .shi.tjustworks talks shit about the mods. There’s too much of a trust deficit, just for starters. And it would be a two-way street if it wasn’t (people in .world claiming le.mee was the one that got taken over and you should decamp from them to our instance).
Past that, you can always make a new website even before federation. The trick is then getting a working community to include you in their network of links and shares. Federation makes that process more explicit and more pronounced. But most local instances have learned not to federate with everyone in the fediverse (because there’s so much gnarly shit out there), which means doing promotion and negotiation to get your new instance recognized by the survivors.
In a single case of a single instance getting taken over, migration is possible if a bit painful. But if it happens repeatedly, thanks to a professional business team going after instances strategically while individual largely-ignorant users have to respond organically, then the Fediverse doesn’t have a chance over the long term. Eventually, the business interest gets control of enough high profile domains and pollutes the means of interpersonal communication to such a high degree that you either trust your instance or you abandon the Fediverse entirely.
It becomes a game of “Who Is The Werewolf?”, which strategically favors the werewolves.
Did you follow the 196 controversy at all? An entire community just upped sticks and left because they got shitty with the mods.
I can see an entire instance being largely abandoned in a matter of days if they got offside with their users badly enough. Add in the loss in traffic from being defederated by everyone, and it would be a big loss for whoever bought the instance.
It’s also propaganda. The more the recipients, the more valuable it becomes to dump huge amounts of money into controlling the narrative with propaganda posts, for which you don’t need admin control over the servers.
Websites get traded on the backend regularly without hemorrhaging their userbases. A large site is going to have a degree of inertia. People aren’t going to all simultaneously pick up out of .world and go to .world2 because someone on le.mee or .shi.tjustworks talks shit about the mods. There’s too much of a trust deficit, just for starters. And it would be a two-way street if it wasn’t (people in .world claiming le.mee was the one that got taken over and you should decamp from them to our instance).
Past that, you can always make a new website even before federation. The trick is then getting a working community to include you in their network of links and shares. Federation makes that process more explicit and more pronounced. But most local instances have learned not to federate with everyone in the fediverse (because there’s so much gnarly shit out there), which means doing promotion and negotiation to get your new instance recognized by the survivors.
In a single case of a single instance getting taken over, migration is possible if a bit painful. But if it happens repeatedly, thanks to a professional business team going after instances strategically while individual largely-ignorant users have to respond organically, then the Fediverse doesn’t have a chance over the long term. Eventually, the business interest gets control of enough high profile domains and pollutes the means of interpersonal communication to such a high degree that you either trust your instance or you abandon the Fediverse entirely.
It becomes a game of “Who Is The Werewolf?”, which strategically favors the werewolves.
Did you follow the 196 controversy at all? An entire community just upped sticks and left because they got shitty with the mods.
I can see an entire instance being largely abandoned in a matter of days if they got offside with their users badly enough. Add in the loss in traffic from being defederated by everyone, and it would be a big loss for whoever bought the instance.
It’s also propaganda. The more the recipients, the more valuable it becomes to dump huge amounts of money into controlling the narrative with propaganda posts, for which you don’t need admin control over the servers.