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?
Just FYI, there’s an issue at .world at the moment (probably from massive sudden population growth) where you can submit a comment and it looks like it didn’t go (spins and spins, or an error, or it looks like you didn’t even click the submit button), but it actually did.
I’ve been checking mine by opening a new tab on my profile to make sure the comments actually went (left click your user name upper right, right click Profile, open in new tab).
Just thought I’d mention it as you accidentally posted that comment a bunch of times. Server growing pains, lol