Seeing Big Tech folks jump into the fediverse and – without so much as a “how do you do, fellow kids?” – roll up their sleeves to write the rules, dream up commercial services, and pontificate about how advertising should run on it. 👀
@aral Don't think, that will work.
@dnkrupinski Never underestimate the impact of capital on a system that has inherent economies of scale and network effects. It happened with the web. No reason why it can’t happen with the fediverse unless we’re all diligent in resisting it from the very start.
@aral You can't buy an existing instance in the fediverse. And even if you are successful buying one or two or three: the other instances will deconnect your instance and the users will take their data and go away and start over somewhere else.
You can take all your followers with you, you just loose your toots, but you still have your personal backups.
So: there is nobody who can make the rules for you, like #Murks (englisch: "botch") is making them for you on the dark side of the web.
@dnkrupinski I’m Big Corp and I have several hundred million “users.” I just added ActivityPub. I’m now the largest instance by several orders of magnitude. All your friends are on me. Your workmates are on me. Heck, even your child’s school is on me. I start making some rules. If your instance (of 1, 100, 1,000?…) doesn’t follow them, I defederate from you. You can’t reach any of those hundreds of millions of people – sorry, “users.” Your friends ask you: “why aren’t you on the fediverse?”
@chris Yep.
@dnkrupinski