While Threads’ integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: “Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web” according to this CNET article.

From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.

In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?

I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.

(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: “any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.”)

  • @sugar_in_your_tea
    20•6 months ago

    I don’t want my posts on the big social media networks, so if we federate with them, I’ll leave. I’m not going to create content to drive ad clicks.

    I’m generally against defederation, but that only applies to smaller communities run by volunteers.

    So I think we should defederate from any platform that uses content to drive an ad network. That’s a simple rule imo. However, I’m happy with it being a case by case thing, I’ll just make my own decisions accordingly.