Preparing for Future Corporate Influence (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by JonCecil@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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?

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[-] cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business 15 points 1 year ago

The real risk isn't really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/"questions" about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/"hey i just found this thing!" posts and so on.

Those aren't as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they're still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that's less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?

Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it's not really the risk that's likely to happen in the short term as much as "social media marketers" shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.

[-] silentdon@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Agreed. Meta's (or any other corporate entity) strategy will most likely involve paying off mods or admins for their influence, allowing undercover ads, bots, etc