Is kbin.social anti-corporation? Should it be?
Is kbin.social anti-corporation? Should it be?
I'm seeing discussions on other instances about how a "federated" corporate instance should be handled, i.e. Meta, or really any major company.
What would kbin.social's stance be towards federating/defederating with a Meta instance?
Or what should that stance be?
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It seems unlikely to me that corporate instances would ever actually federate in good faith.
They may appear to be compliant initially, but in the long term they just have different goals.
I'm not sure where exactly the line gets drawn, but at the far extreme, I say we treat money-making instances as bad actors. If they stand to gain profit from their actions, they need to be defederated to prevent the sabotaging or enshittification of the fediverse.
Maybe true. What of a money-making instance that was a B Corp, or a non-profit (moneymaking but aligned to a purpose?) I think there might be space for something along those lines?
@Melpomene I'm concerned about the B-Corp getting big, but staying profit driven. Imagine if Steam had an instance. That seems... fine, I guess, for now. But then let's say Steam suddenly acquires the entire video game industry lol. That's definitely a problem. But what if they do it over.. 12 years? At what point are we supposed to realize we're frogs getting boiled?
And non-profits, yeah, you're probably right that they should be fine.
But okay, do you know MEC? They were initially Mountain Equipment Co-op, technically a non-profit. Now they're Mountain Equipment Company, a retail store, but most customers barely registered the difference. This type of thing concerns me lol.
I think B Corps and non-profits can be allowed to make magazines here, that's fine. They just need to follow our rules. They won't like it, but no risk of Fediverse collapse ever, and honestly it's probably best if we get to hold them accountable this way.
A fair point re priorities shifting, for sure. Though we'd run into the same problem if a super popular instance decided to sell its instance to, say, Google. There's nothing stopping that from happening, either. Bad actors are going to act bad; we just need to figure out how to mitigate their impact.
I have a fair bit of skepticism re nonprofits too. But beyond defederation, there's not much we can do to stop anyone (including Meta) from operating in this space.