The conjunction of Bill C-18 in Canada with the rumoured release of an ActivityPub-enabled service from Meta seems incredibly fortuitous.
I will now shout for those in the back of the room.
MEDIA COMPANIES IN CANADA: NOW IS THE TIME TO SET UP YOUR SITE ON THE FEDIVERSE.
YOUR SITE, YOUR RULES. REACH YOUR AUDIENCE DIRECTLY.
#cdnpoli
Ok fine, but what happens if hosting your own server becomes inaccessible due to costs and media companies become the only ones being able to do so and transtake control over the fediverse?
The way I see it, if there’s money to be made with something, you can bet your butt that corporations are going to take over and ensure they keep control over it. And that’s what I’m afraid of.
Right now it’s easy enough to switch, but even hosting your own server requires either some old PC in a closet or a little raspberry pi server somewhere with a decent enough internet connection with sufficiently high data usage limits at the very least. Otherwise you have to find a company willing to host your server or in the cloud.
Again, in new to this, so please correct me if this doesn’t make sense. I’m willing to learn.
Ok fine, but what happens if hosting your own server becomes inaccessible due to costs and media companies become the only ones being able to do so and take control over the fediverse?
If a lot of people start using the fediverse the costs could become too much even if media companies aren’t involved. The costs aren’t dependent on the media companies’ involvement it’s dependent on the number of users on the service. If too many people start using the fediverse right now it’s already the case where it could become unsustainable and servers may shut down and we’d have to go back to reddit or wherever.
Though I think it’s doubtful that will happen. Various costs keep decreasing, and if the number of users increase, the amount of ad revenue and/or donation revenue will scale with that. Also the number of people with the knowledge and resources to set up a server to host a portion of users would increase.
Besides having a corporation handling some of the load would in some ways decrease the costs to private individuals and small organizations hosting their sites. Sure there would be more content available to serve to their users but that would be a good thing isn’t it? The various user interface interactions from the users of a corporate fediverse site would cost that corporation bandwidth costs.
“Finding a company willing to host your server or in the cloud” is trivial once you actually get serious about looking. There are entire companies whose only line of business is offering server space. They’ve been around for decades for decades and some have grown positively huge.
Some names to get you started:
Digital Ocean
Linode (now owned by Akami)
Host Papa (Canadian web hosting service that also offers server space).
There are also turnkey installers for lemmy, some tailored to specific hosting technologies.
The only way for corporations to take over the fediverse is through the inaction of those who prefer otherwise. Keeping in mind, of course, that it might turn out that the majority of people might actually flock to a Facebook-controlled instance. No big deal. Those of us who prefer to just kick around on the open internet will continue to do so.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !canada@lemmy.ca
Ok fine, but what happens if hosting your own server becomes inaccessible due to costs and media companies become the only ones being able to do so and
transtake control over the fediverse?The way I see it, if there’s money to be made with something, you can bet your butt that corporations are going to take over and ensure they keep control over it. And that’s what I’m afraid of.
Right now it’s easy enough to switch, but even hosting your own server requires either some old PC in a closet or a little raspberry pi server somewhere with a decent enough internet connection with sufficiently high data usage limits at the very least. Otherwise you have to find a company willing to host your server or in the cloud.
Again, in new to this, so please correct me if this doesn’t make sense. I’m willing to learn.
Edit: a word due to autocorrect
If a lot of people start using the fediverse the costs could become too much even if media companies aren’t involved. The costs aren’t dependent on the media companies’ involvement it’s dependent on the number of users on the service. If too many people start using the fediverse right now it’s already the case where it could become unsustainable and servers may shut down and we’d have to go back to reddit or wherever.
Though I think it’s doubtful that will happen. Various costs keep decreasing, and if the number of users increase, the amount of ad revenue and/or donation revenue will scale with that. Also the number of people with the knowledge and resources to set up a server to host a portion of users would increase.
Besides having a corporation handling some of the load would in some ways decrease the costs to private individuals and small organizations hosting their sites. Sure there would be more content available to serve to their users but that would be a good thing isn’t it? The various user interface interactions from the users of a corporate fediverse site would cost that corporation bandwidth costs.
“Finding a company willing to host your server or in the cloud” is trivial once you actually get serious about looking. There are entire companies whose only line of business is offering server space. They’ve been around for decades for decades and some have grown positively huge.
Some names to get you started:
Digital Ocean
Linode (now owned by Akami)
Host Papa (Canadian web hosting service that also offers server space).
There are also turnkey installers for lemmy, some tailored to specific hosting technologies.
The only way for corporations to take over the fediverse is through the inaction of those who prefer otherwise. Keeping in mind, of course, that it might turn out that the majority of people might actually flock to a Facebook-controlled instance. No big deal. Those of us who prefer to just kick around on the open internet will continue to do so.