The Fediverse as it stands now is super ambitious, prospering, and honestly really exciting to see and be a part of.
I worry about the sustainability, though. The current model of donations, volunteer mods, and so on is working as intended, and the experience is flourishing. I see this model standing up for at least a couple of years as-is, barring any major changes of any kind.
My question becomes: How do we plan for the future entry of corporate influence into all of this? Because it will happen. I’ve watched most social media platforms and systems come into being in my lifetime, and also watched most of their demises. Money, marketing, and ads always come for them in some form.
What’s being done now to help prevent toxic corporate influence in the future? Can anything be done? The best part about defederated instances is a corporate influence could get ahold of one instance, but not all of them. Great in concept, but how do we plan for a future when corporate interest reaches these platforms and they throw enough money around to shake things up for the worse, as it always seems to?
The account migration feature is sorely needed to help mitigate the chance of one instance monopolizing a majority of Lemmy users.
Mastodon already has solid account migration so I assume this will come to lemmy as well. But at the moment the development focus is more towards stability and performance than features.
Also, with the ActivityPub being clearly defined, a “move my account” type bot is surely in existence in no time.
I’m currently working on “magic link login” where a server hosts a micro-ActivityPub with one user, and that user can then message other users in the Fediverse their login link.
While doing this, I also noticed this could be used to created spam bots, so I’m really missing OpenID features on here.
It’s all growing pains, they’ll be solved quickly enough.