Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
Think about email. A lot of people use Gmail, Hotmail, or other big email providers. However, Oxford University can run its own email server for its own university community. The EFF can run their own email server for their own purposes. Google or Microsoft doesn’t get to dictate to Oxford or the EFF how they run their email server; and they can’t stand in the way of Oxford and the EFF sending email to one another.
It is not that simple to run your own email server anymore. Big providers like Google will treat emails from your server as spam and you will have a difficult time having the mail properly delivered. So big tech has effectively squeezed out federated email.
Set up DKIM and they’ll accept your email. That’s just anti-spam / anti-phishing; it’s not an attempt to shut down independent email.
The big players do definitely try to shut down independent email. We don’t have to let them succeed though, and the way to fight back is to host your own.
Edit: *one way to fight back.
Hmm. If what you were saying was true, then a lot of new Lemmy instance operators would be having problems with email verification.
Lemmy allows using any smtp server to send emails. Can use Googles servers, fastmails servers etc.
It’s different from running your own email server. If you run your own, then Google and the others are definently not going to trust it. There are lots of blog posts about the pain of running your own email server.
There are literally no problems running your own server if you comply with anti spam measures.
Most germans are on gmx.net, and they block residential ips. So it’s impossible to send them messages. So i had to abandon my efforts.
How does that work, complying with anti spam measures?
I’ve had hosted email from a service provider for years and never had a problem. I’m not talking anyone big here.
This is truly not meant to be snarky: It sounds like you don’t know how email works.
FUD
I have self hosted my email for five years. I’m a hobbyist and it is no problem for me.
Occassionally (very rarely) an email to a new address I’ve never sent before will end up erroneously in a spam folder. This never happens when I send to a business. Instead of everyone throwing up their hands and saying email is way too hard now, how about we hold the big providers accountable for their obvious bullying?
Because we can’t. Who are you going to complain to about it?
Don’t get me wrong, would love to give them as much pain as possible over this. But I don’t see how we can do anything. If I start my own email server, I’m probably going to miss important emails and end up in lots of troubleshooting things. I’m wish it wasnt so. The ideas of the original internet was amazing but capitalism can’t be reasoned with.
It consumes all until there is nothing left.
some of them blacklist large blocks of ip addresses. Lawsuits can go a long way to forcing them to justify and/or stop this. EFF is working on this, so I give them money. The other thing I can do personally is write to legislators and make sure they are aware of the issue. It’s not yerribly satisfying, but I hope it helps.
In the meantime, I will not be deterred from self hosting. F*@k google.
Keep up the good fight. I’m grateful you are trying. And fuck Google.
If anything anyone could also just pick a mail routing server, pay like $50 a year and have as many emails for as many domains as they want. I got one, I have like 8 domains pointed to it for emails. All I had to do was fill in the blanks for the DNS page for the domain (mx, and the spf+dkim) and all emails I send go to inbox like butter. Unlimited email accounts, takes 15 seconds to make, no phone no name no nothing just email+pass and it exists now.
gmail was nice for a bit, but shit man I don’t want to give my life story and phone number every time I want to make an email address.
Why do big companies always mark you as spam, and why is it always Hotmail?
My experience is that I have to remove myself from spamhouse once every couple of months, because Hotmail decided that my 5 emails to different accounts was spam. TBF, it’s better than silently failing which is annoying as hell.
The problem with email is the same is always been: antiquated software.
The email protocol was never designed for an internet with bad actors and bots. It’s from the early hopeful days. We absolutely need a better email system - however, it’s simple use, the fact anyone can run one, it’s simplicity, is what made it so useful.
The difference with Lemmy(et. al.) Is that the protocol is designed in the modern age, and isn’t required to also keep up with bad actors for legacy reasons. If Meta decide to join and fill it full of bad actors, Lemmy has a choice email never had. Lemmy can choose to add verification, peer-conversation, trust keys.
It however still has the same basic problem: to be useful for everyone, it has to work with everyone. The discussions and decisions about how that happen are not just technological, but also moral and ideal-based.
Meta, then, in this context, is the first spam email server. How Lemmy/the community/etc respond will be the challenge.
There’s nothing wrong with email. It is essential for all business transacted online. It’s still, by far, the most useful federated software. All that the “bad actors” can do is send messages that the receiver didn’t want, and that’s trivial to stop.
That’s absolutely not true. I run my own email server with multiple domains and multiple accounts and it’s no where close to a difficult IT task.
If anything it’s the ISPs that will hassle you for outbound SMTP. There are ways around that but generally blocked by default
You’re talking about something completely unrelated to security then. If you want to run services out of your home then you need to buy a business level connection. Or find a VPS service.
None of this will cause you problems with the big names in email as long as you follow the spam procedures.
I was actually agreeing with you, in that running a private mail server is not a difficult endeavor as long as you take those things into account. Most VPS and CSP will block SMTP by default (just recently went through this with AWS, had to specifically request the service) since most everyone doesn’t have a clue how to secure mail relays and stay off blacklists.
Google, Live, AOL, Yahoo etc might hassle you for DKIM or SPF, but in my experience the ISP is the first hurdle.
Ah i see. Yeah i went through that process with AWS too. It sucks but it’s not a horrible process.
Or find a VPS service.
None of this will cause you problems with the big names in email as long as you follow the spam procedures.
I’m yet to see a vps service that is not outright banned on gmail.
I run on AWS Lightsail, have been since 2018 and all is working fine.
Yeeaaah, I should have worded it as “cheap vps service”.
To be fair, the example OP used was that two independent email servers could still send mail to eachother even if they can’t send mail to gmail. I do feel like social networking has a little bit of an advantage over email there, because email, to be useful, needs to be able to talk to almost anyone you might need to send an email to, those specific users. If a few big instances defederate small instances in that scenario, you basically have to use the big instances because you will most likely need to talk to specific users who are on those big instances at some point. However, in a social network, you want to be able to talk to enough people to have discussions and content, but it doesn’t matter as much if you can talk to any specific user or specific account, so it’s much more viable to have a smaller network of independent instances that still functions if cut off from the big ones, as long as they can collectively retain enough users to be interesting.
And this is what people are afraid of with meta joining Mastadon.
Great example. Fedverse sounds like a space that corporations would have no interest in as there is no opportunity to create a monopoly.
That doesn’t really follow. Google doesn’t need to be able to create a monopoly over email to benefit from running Gmail, for example; consumer Gmail is basically a loss-leader for Google Workspaces, the money-making arm of Google Apps.
The only viable way to control the Fediverse is an embrace, extend, and extinguish approach.
- Join the Fediverse
- Pour a ton of money and manpower on your instance so most people migrate to it because it works better.
- Reach critical mass and defederate the others.
- Proceed to screw your users.
Anything less and you become a Fediverse backwater instead of a monopoly.
This sounds exactly like how they would think! Especially the reach critical mass and defederate from everyone else.
they did: see xmpp
What a great read. Thanks for linking that article - I had no idea about most of that stuff.
This is what many expect is the goal of Meta’s forthcoming Thread.
And harvesting data of course.
Could you describe in detail what you’re saying here?
Well they hoard data by hosting your emails? They surely feed all that stuff into their AI:s.
consumer Gmail is basically a loss-leader for Google Workspaces, the money-making arm of Google Apps.
Don’t quote me on this, because I might be wrong, but I believe consumer Gmail is also used to build their personalized ad model for you, so they can show you ads you’re more likely to click on?
I believe they used to target ads based on email content, but they currently state that they don’t.
These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you’re signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
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So far I think this is the most succinct and correct answer.
In another thread I posted the hypothetical example of a company standing up an instance with a really robust infrastructure (lots of storage, fast and redundant servers, etc). They could use their more significant money and resources to offer things other instances can’t. For example they could attract big names to do AMAs, or they could create communities with huge amounts of useful content that lots of people feel is invaluable. People would be encouraged to make lots of communities there and lots might make it their home instance.
Then, once it’s really entrenched, the company could decide to start charging a subscription for access, or could start serving up ads. It could be painful to walk away from it in a similar way people have felt pain moving away from Reddit. The difference is that, regardless of how big it is, it’s still just one instance among many. You wouldn’t have to walk away from Lemmy, just that instance.
The “Barbie” movie is the only allowed corporate interest on Lemmy, only in theaters July 21st.
I’ve seen your account all over the place, love it. You could even be the real one and we’d never have any way of knowing.
Does the meme account continue after barbie is done?
I will never stop until I win my Oscar this year for “Barbie”.
I would have won it easily in 2018 if they named the movie “It’s Hardin’ Time” like I asked them to. “But ooohh, Margot, that name will never catch on, and what do you mean you want your character to ‘Tonya Hardin’ all over Nancy Kerrigan’?”
True genius is never appreciated until it’s too late.
Your creepy AI picture of her freaks me out
… OK, I admit, I may have went a little too far with the photo filters this time.
I finally saw a trailer for that movie and it hella reminded me of the Lego Movie. It even has the same actor playing a similar bad guy! If he is named something like “President Business” I will shit my pants laughing.
You’re not the real Margot Robbie… Are you? 😳
Of course I am real, I am as real as the multiple “Barbie” tickets you will buy for your friends and family on opening day July 21st.
But my friends and family aren’t real
Hello Margot Robbie
Hi!
“Free” is a simplification. Bad actors can hurt lemmy - however it is also easier for the individual to fight back. If an instance acts unfairly, an individual can choose to ignore that instance and not lose all of Lemmy - they would still have access to all other instances.
Follow up question - if I created my account on an instance, and that instance is a bad actor and disappears (not just defederated, but shuts down), wouldn’t I lose my account and all the content associated with it? Posts, replies, saved stuff, etc? That is my understanding based on another thread.
Assuming so, doesn’t that incentivise people to create their accounts on a large instance like lemmy.world? Let’s be real that 99.99% of people are not going to host their own instance to create their account.
Your history would still be out there in the fediverse, but you’d no longer have access to your account to interact with it.
Have multiple accounts across different instances. If you pick a few big ones and a few small ones the likelihood that you get stuck without access to anything one day is infinitesimal.
I have a few accounts right now just because sometimes they go down. At first the thought of having franked accounts bothered me, but without the karma system, why should I care about my individual accounts?
Sure they can. But…
- How can they compete in a space where people are already there providing a service without trying to extract value from them?
- Why would one of these larger instances sell out when their userbase can sustain them and selling out is antithetical to the reason they started the instance in the first place?
- I and many people like me would be fine in our own instances. We’d just defederate. If, say, lemmy.world sold out those guys would just have to switch instances. It’s a pain, yes, but it’s possible.
- By providing better services and features. Corporations are capable of providing good pro user services when they’re forced to through competition, but what they’ll do is do that until they build a big enough user base then splinter off and start pulling the same shit again. It’s the whole thing behind embrace-extend-extinguish.
- Money. Lots of money. If money doesn’t work they’ll try to compete on point 1.
- Agree. Most people will be too lazy and unprincipled to care, but I’m fine with a smaller higher quality community and Lemmy makes that possible. If corporations get a foothold on the platform it’ll still be impossible for them to get a 100% monopoly like they can on their own proprietary centralized platforms.
I don’t think #2 is a strong argument. Reddit, when started, had very different ideals from what it does now. The founders did too, or at least the dead guy did, idk if spez was always what he is now.
If I started a Lemmy or Mastodon instance and it got REAL big, and after 5, maybe 10 years of maintaining it, it’s sustainable, but probably not really making me money and I’m tired of running it… And Meta comes around and says “Hey we’ll buy it for 10 million dollars so we can federate it with our own activitypub based social media”, I’d probably say yes. Wouldn’t you? And while everyone COULD switch, not everyone will. Not everyone switched from reddit either.
So I’d say it’s theoretically possible to corporatize vast parts of the fediverse, but of course there will always be room for people to start new instanced that don’t federate with the corporate ones.
Everybody has a price… Sell out is just a matter to get to that price
Yes perhaps it’s a bit optimistic to think Ruud or sunaurus wouldn’t sell out for, say, a billion dollars. But I think that it’d also be unrealistic to think Meta would actually offer a substantial amount of money measured even in the millions of dollars for any single Lemmy instance.
it’s similar to what’s happening with mastodon right now. there’s something going on with meta (the zuck) getting involved with mastodon.social, the biggest mastodon instance. because of that reason, a lot of people including myself have switched instances or to a different service entirely. it’s an overwhelming ‘no’ for corporations getting involved with federated social media.
Do you have a source for Meta working with mastodon.social?
How about you provide me with a SOURCE!
Well here you are: https://mastodon.social/@alexeheath/110596207691212890
Eugen respondend though: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/110599738227401392
And there were other screenshots of Eugen saying he was meeting with Meta Maybe no secret deals- But an NDA meeting.
Do you have a source for Meta being involved with mastodon.social? That’s highly concerning because the same people that run mastodon.social also run lemmy.world.
All I’ve heard is that their new Threads app will be connected to the fediverse. Not sure what other development there is.
honestly i don’t have a specific source, it’s more something i found out through hearsay on mastodon.social. personally i’m now part of a calckey instance that’s specifically stated they won’t associate with meta. searching around i found this but nothing concrete.
Then who runs mastodon.world?
Ah, I tried deleting my comment pretty quickly after making it when I did some research and realized I was wrong. The deleted comment must not have updated properly with other Lemmy instances? Lemmy.world is not run by the same people as mastodon.social - you’re right that it’s run by the same people as mastodon.world. I was mistaken.
No worries. I was a bit confused too.
They can - but everyone else can choose to defederate from them. It gives others choice of whether or not they want their instance to participate (or let another instance) participate in their activities.
And then if you as a user don’t agree with how the admins are running the instance you’re a part of, you can make a new account under a different instance with admins that run that instance differently (i.e. by federating with corporate platforms).
It’s like how game servers used to work back before matchmaking systems. If the server you like gets taken over by a dickwad, you can find a new one or start your own server.
Technically you can do this without a federated system like Lemmy, but it is way easier to do with a system like this than starting a normal website with the capacity to handle a large number of users as you don’t necessarily need servers to handle a lot, you can just grab content from other servers you like.
If you have access to the source code (which you do), the only effective corporate attack against networked software is to convince all your friends not to use the software and to use their proprietary software instead.
They will eventually start astroturfing when the audience is big enough. There’s no stopping that, but at least they won’t be able to control the votes as easily.
It’s already started. There was a technology post earlier that included an affiliate link to a big online retailer.
It won’t be long before Disney astroturfs the entertainment communities and car companies astroturf the tech communities. There is no way to prevent it without requiring a level of privacy invasion that most people would not welcome.
The fediverse is just as susceptible to this as every other platform. Now that Lemmy is counting users in the millions, the enshitifcation will begin. I just hope the communities figure out some novel way to mitigate it.
It won’t be the enshittification that we’re used to and that Cory Doctorow wrote about. The platform as a whole is unlikely to do that to us, although certain instances definitely will.
Instead, this will be more like an arms race. Bad actors (especially spammers) will try to force their content upon us, and we will do everything we can to block/prevent that. I’m including astroturfing as part of this, since it’s being run by peer nodes (unaffiliated with the platform) instead of admins.
I hope you are right about better mechanisms to detect and control Astroturfing. It is what killed Reddit for me, not the whole API mess.
If you want a Reddit example, go look at the “Naked and Afraid” subreddit dedicated to the show. Almost all the activity is from accounts with the same semantic naming pattern and who have the same account pattern in terms of age and ratio of karma.
When you look at what is being posted, it is obvious that Discovery/Max paid some shitty social-media marketing company to “increase engagement”. They will post for a thing, against a thing, opened ended questions, etc. then all the other fake accounts pile in and respond. Creating comment chains 8-12 deep with fake comments to try and keep you “engaged” with their content.
The same thing will happen here. The Astroturfers don’t care about community standards, rules, “shame”, or accounts. They create and burn accounts by the hundreds of thousands. They also make money in this, so they will just continue to optimize for any criteria the fediverse uses to move content to “hot” visibility.
I haven’t seen a platform yet that has a good way to combat this.
Not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it certainly sounds like bad actors. Where did the existing toolset fall short? Were there mods? Did they remove these posts/comments? Minimum account ages?
Once we identify the tools needed to fight the spam, they get deployed. If effective, the spammers move on to the next arms to push their wares. I know I saw a LOT of comments shortly before the end of Reddit that the parent was a karma-farming bot.
We will always be behind the curve, since it’s the nature of being reactive, but hopefully we can keep the return low enough to make it not worth the effort for most.
I’ve already seen KFC astroturfing on Kbin.
They could buyout instances if they wanted, but people could just moved to another instance and other instances can defederate from the corporate instance.
Yeah, nothing better than taking a million euros and then just making a new instance with a slightly different name.
This is especially relevant right now. Meta (Facebook’s parent company) is just now launching a (heavily) modified Mastodon instance. There is a push to immediately defederate them to keep them out (Source)
There’s a good discussion about it here. But in short, if you allow a single dominant player to exist, they can effectively take over the entire ecosystem
Switch to a new instance when that happens
Easy enough to switch instances if/when it happens
The biggest problem Lemmy has is funding, and that’s going to be a continual problem.
But it’s like this. Corporations can enter the space and offer their content/servers/communities for free, and people can use those servers. If people want to be on corpo servers, they can choose it, if they don’t they won’t be on one.
If corporations start charging for server, then the other Lemmy servers just don’t pay and restrict access to those servers, people will choose if they want to pay for Lemmy (and go to Lemmy servers who pay, or the corpo servers) or more likely accept it and stop.
But like I said the problem is funding, there needs to be continual funding to run the servers they have, but I believe the goal will be to keep the servers from being bloated pieces of shit like Reddit, and hopefully that means they will be cheaper and maybe can be done through donations.
As for “Can’t they buy out.” Let’s say I’m bad guy business, and I’ll simply offer to hire you or buy your business, you never actually have to work for me, or sell me your business. The only reason something like Activision will sell their business is because Activision because Activision wants to, or really a majority of share holders want to.
Lemmy.world is owned by something or someone. If they don’t want to sell to a corporation they can just choose not to. The problem is Reddit is owned by shareholders, and enough shareholders that they can be taken over.
If someone has 51 percent of reddit (Conde Nast) and someone offers A LOT of money for Reddit, they can still say no… though Conde Nast as a corporation itself has share holders themselves so if they did something stupid (Ignoring an offer for like 2-10x the valuation) those share holders are going to question it… That doesn’t mean Conde Nast HAS to even take a 10x valuation (if they think the site is worth 20x, they obviously wouldn’t) but that’s why Reddit is able to be bought since they have to answer to the share holders and Lemmy theoretically could stay non corporate.
The thing is: the average person with admin skills can probably house 100+ users at almost no cost, or comfortably out of pocket
maybe a few donations soo thats what decentralisation hopes to achive
One of the major instances (lemmy.ml? Maybe lemmy.world? I can’t find the post right now) recently posted that they completed a massive spec upgrade for their instance. It was remarkably reasonable, and could very easily be covered by donations. Something like 4 vCPUs and 32GB RAM. Or, failing that, (and I know a lot of people will balk at this), a single non-datamined ad at the top of the page.
