While Threads’ integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: “Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web” according to this CNET article.

From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.

In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?

I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.

(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: “any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.”)

  • ruplicant@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    11 months ago

    i would be onboard with the non-commercial walled garden. it would be a very open garden since posts are public, and that’s the kind of garden i like

    i’m not against federation with some platform just because it is run by a company, but am against a company monetizing the content of the fediverse, on the back of instance owners’ expenses and instance users’ contributions. is there going to be any commercial entity not doing this? if one does appear i would be open to a discussion on federation when that happens

    that’s on principle, and not mentioning the actual dangers regarding quality of discourse and viability of the fediverse that were discussed on the other post about Threads - these will be present with any big commercial platform like that Flipboard thing seems to be

    i would even be up for joing the Fedipact and trying to act collectvely to protect the Fediverse