Originally posted on mastodon, April 2nd, 2024
I don't share these thoughts often because I don't see much of a point in potentially causing conflict over things that are completely out of my hands, but I do feel a lot of frustration at the corporate adoption of the fediverse.
I think this mostly just stems from our history on here. Our system has been on fedi since 2016, when mastodon.social was the only mastodon instance and there were 3000 total users. We've been here for the history of the fediverse from then on, and have seen how much everyone back then made such massive, concerted efforts to keep corporate encroachment out, always successfully back then. It was a weird mess of a space of queer leftists of different stripes who wanted a space for themselves, completely out of the control of the corporate internet.
especially in 2017, when mastodon suddenly went from a few thousand users and 3 instances, to over a million users (I can't remember if it reached multi-millions or not) and thousands of instances, there were multiple attempts by different brands and corporations to set up shop, either with their own instances, fedi software, or brand accounts, and they were always driven out by the community. heated discourse and community fighting and splits has always existed, many of the different sides of the fediverse that exist today had their initial conflicts beginning all the way at the start back then, but despite that, there was what felt like a very universal understanding that we could not let this space become appropriated by the capitalists we were escaping.
The dream of a larger fediverse died for a lot of early folks, including us, a long time back, around 2018-19 for us. we stayed on because of the friends we had made and in general because, despite our general disillusionment with fedi and the social dynamics on it that lead to very vicious discourses, it was still a more pleasant space to exist on in comparison to the rest of the internet, even if it wasn't really growing anymore.
The sudden revival of the fediverse as a real potential alternative to the corporate internet caught us and many others completely off guard, and now, the fediverse is suddenly larger than it has ever been. And so, i suppose its just... been deeply frustrating, having this old dream revived like this, and it genuinely seeming more possible than ever before, but having this growing storm cloud of corporate attempts at entering and taking over the space reemerging, with projects much larger and with vastly more monetary backing than in the past, and with more splits in the modern fediverse as to how to approach this rather than the near universal pushback as existed before. I hate the idea that everything we've witnessed could in the end just have been for the propping up of new services for the corporations we were all escaping.