Earlier today there was a post about rejecting Meta’s intrusion in the fediverse, some don’t see the danger in it or think it’s unlikely that Meta can do any damage to the fediverse.
Someone posted this in the comments and I think it’s extremely relevant and it deserves its own post so all can see it.
That can happen whether it is an existing corporation or an instance that is large enough to do it by itself.
Lemmy.world currently dominates a lot of activity; it has a ton of users and typically has a majority of top posts. If Lemmy.world defederated, it could possibly survive on its own outside of the federation.
It’s not the same. The idea is not to defederate, but to STAY federated, while making your instance seem like the best and only option.
To extend your analogy, it would be more like if lemmy.world stayed federated, but switched over to its own forked implementation of lemmy. Slowly introducing cool new features that only exist on their fork to entice users away to their instance. Maybe you see a message like “sign up to lemmy.world to see this” or “your instance is not compatible with this”. Now you’re forcing other instances to either die or play catch up.
Now obviously the folks at lemmy.world wouldnt do such a thing, because the instance is being run by like minded people who just want to host lemmy. But this is a very real tactic that can be implemented by the likes of google/microsoft/meta.
Now, Lemmy is AGPL licensed which is a nice safety net, but I’m sure a sufficiently motivated company could try to find ways around it.
But it is important to note that the tactic could get implemented by people other than big companies.
And while Lemmy is AGPL licensed, the license doesn’t appear to compel modifiers to publish their code. So, you could have a Lemmy instance develop new features, but not provide the source code for those features.
Yup, anyone can do it but it’s definitely a resource heavy task