Personally, I want nothing to do with them and I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved to the Fediverse to get away from all these corpos.
Personally, I want nothing to do with them and I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved to the Fediverse to get away from all these corpos.
That’s what they said about the Web back in the 90s and early 00s. Back then we all said “companies can’t take over the entire Web. If they tried something, anyone could just make their own site.” But they didn’t need to prevent others from making a competitor site; they just needed to make theirs take up a big enough piece of the pie. Now look at what at we have to deal with with the Web as it is today…
All they need is to make their own instance, and then get it big enough, and it’d be virtually no different than more traditional websites. Sure, anyone can make their own instances or communities, but without the hardware to prop up thousands to millions of users there’s no way anyone could compete with a company-sponsored instance past a certain threshold of critical mass.
And they still have not taken over the web. There’s plenty of places online that are not under corporate control, look at any piracy site for example, or even 4chan. People willingly choose to use corporate services, but those corporate services are not the only places to go.
Technically true, but the majority of people are not that technically savvy nor interested in seeking out comparatively obscure platforms. Most people on the Web go onto corporate platforms or corporate - sponsored platforms. That also means that even a lot of the people who would normally seek out more comparatively obscure or out-of-the-way platforms are forced by dint of practicality just to keep in contact with friends and family, a lá Facebook Messenger.
As I said, they don’t need to take over the whole web to domimate the web, just a large enough piece of the pie. Sure, it may be only 99%, but practically speaking that 1% won’t functionally exist for the vast majority of people, even to those who would otherwise seek it out.