An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
No I understand the word. What I’m saying is that as the fediverse grows, and large communities develop, there will be large corps will want a piece of the action. They operate with money, they down build or create, they buy. What would you do, you living you life as you are now, but decide to take up running an instance. Assume that instance grows very large and starts getting worldwide recognition, and some corporate affiliated executive invites you to meet and they give you a very real offer of $84,000,000,000 to give the instance to them. They promise to add the features you’ve wanted to implement but was struggling to, offer a team of people to help with your bot and spam issues. Would you turn that down? Idk about you, but I could definitely use 84 million dollars. I hate corps with a passion, I believe they ruin everything they touch, but I could do the things I want with that kind of money.
And so what do the community’s of thousands upon thousands members do when their admin sells out? Do they move? Can the entire community just up and move to another instance and keep the same engagement? Would they even want to? The corpo’s just implemented the features they’ve been asking for for years, they can’t be that bad right? Besides we like it here. I’m sure it’ll be fine, right? Besides, Amazon already ownes one of the other largeest instance, and we’re def not moving to the one meta runs, what’s one more?
And of course once the large corps have thrown all their money at the newest popular thing, they repeat the process. All of them Switch from growth focus to monetization focus and everything turns to shit.
There are other options, there are smaller instances that people could move to, and that probably will happen, but the effect will be similar. People who were all gathered in once place, enjoying one thing, get splintered into lots of other smaller groups, with a newer differenter thing. And it starts over again.