I am not one for policies restricting choice but I fear the situation where Meta sets up instances that become big, say like Lemmy.world. Then one day when their instance is popular, they decide to charge other instances to federate with Meta’s instances.

Big corps like YouTube, twitter, Meta, etc are known to offer services at a loss to grow their service and then drop the hammer and demand payment to use what people already rely on.

I feel a policy that prevents federated corp instance from profiting early on from FOSS, self hosted, and volunteer federated servers is something to think about - though I do not know the best approach.

I like what Open Source software does with their licensing approach where you are free to view, use, and contribute but if you take you must distribute the source code to others. Some outright ban usage for profit without a license.

Obviously licensing applies well for software to prevent abuse, and I would like a discussion about what Terms of Use policies can prevent volunteer work from being abused - if any are desired.

see the following cross-post from: https://programming.dev/post/427323

Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?

I’m not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.

Here is a link if someone don’t know what Meta’s Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

  • deejay4am@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    This is not the issue you should be scared of.

    You should be scared because every terminally online non-technical person you know ALREADY has a Thread account.

    Here’s the way it will go down:

    • Thread federates
    • Users complain it’s too hard to remember the @mastodon.social vs @thread.meta or whatever
    • Meta removes requirement for Thread users to have to do that within Thread when mentioning for searching other Thread users
    • Thread users complain to users outside Thread that it’s annoying they have to “be that way” and they should “just use Thread to make it easy, dude”
    • at the same time Many instances defederate with Thread
    • Thread adds “Megaheart” superlike feature that adds a sticker with an animation to someone’s “prick” (what do they call posts over at Thread anyway?)
    • Users on Thread complain that they can’t superlike users from other instances
    • Users from other instances get sick of their complaining and move to Thread’s instance
    • Important business and service accounts move to Thread to “ensure comparability and availability”
    • Thread defederates from the larger network, having captured all the important content that people find useful
    • The rest of the fediverse remains mostly people posting about the fediverse, how to host their own instance, and arguing about how to move forward on an increasingly fruitless-seeming open source project.

    ( - in 2032, Thread decides to charge for API access, citing “freeloading app developers who have been profiteering off their hard work”)