This is good for us, and for businesses, influencers and celebrities.
They need to be encouraged to operate their own instances, and not just an account in Threads or elsewhere in Meta.
- You get to have a “home base” for your presence on Threads and the Fediverse that’s independent of Big Tech. Ah, the advantages of owning your online house instead of renting! That’s why we have a Fediverse.
- You get to make the rules, not Meta. You’re not getting your content taken down by a faceless corp because some AI software mistakenly concluded you violated TOS. You’re not gonna get NSFW’d out of business so some CEO can make bucks with an IPO. And you can kick off the jerkwads that are harassing you when Meta won’t.
- You get to structure communities/discussions on your instance the way you want.
AND, getting enough celebrities, influencers and businesses to operate their own instances will take power away from Meta. If there’s a critical mass of in-demand people and content outside of Meta in the Fediverse, and Threads users get access to that content, Meta won’t be able to wall up the garden without a riot from their users. Enough celebrities on Threads, but not on their servers, and Meta will be forced to keep things open and make EEE much harder for them.
Now all we need is for a few in-demand people to make that leap…
Thoughts?
The big attraction for using TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, whatever, is the ease of use, the almost zero learning curve. Find a hosting company that has a 1-click instance install, and then put an admin frontend on it where just about anybody can just check boxes to configure it. Once you’ve done that, everybody will spin up their own instance.
I highly doubt most users would want to pay to makes their experience harder.
How many people host their own email server?
I believe heavy users, such as influencers, companies, and some government agencies would want to host their own instances.
At least governments/any essential services around the world should
Oh yeah, look at the Twitster Fire when King Elon ordered those viewing limits. That was blocking cities, states, and federal agencies from communicating with the public. Sometimes in emergencies.
Yeah, governments are going to want their own instances for that reason.
It would solve the verification problem that twitter has now that they want organizations to pay thousands to be verified. Instances ending in a .gov domain would be obvious legit government accounts.
Would make it a little like work email addresses too.
Say, if NYT had their own instance and disabled open sign-ups for user accounts, you could be certain that any account posting from that instance is a legit NYT account.
Getting more celebs & businesses on their own instances may have the side effect of adding more moderator eyeballs to the discussions. If celebrities just ran an account on Threads, they’re mostly at the mercy of Meta’s staff and AI. If they host their own, they’ll probably bring in someone to moderate as well. Some better than others, but it serves to distribute the moderation load a bit more and keeps more of that power away from Meta.
It would be nice. But a reminder that they hired a person to type for them doing AMAs in reddit… Yes typing.
They just don’t care, aren’t tech savvy, don’t have time or don’t want to do it.
I bet they just want to go where there’s most of the people to do their promotion once instead of several places and save time. You could try to explain federation to them but I bet they just want to use the “new Twitter”.
I was watching that Felicia Day announce that she made a threads account and she is (or pretends to be) tech savvy. She has geeks as fan base that would mock her for doing so… Image someone like Scarlett Johansson "waste"time in her own server
Depends on the celeb. Some are like you describe, some can have a bit more of an activist bent, like Cory Doctorow. It’ll probably take some of the activist types to take that first leap.
Also, not just celebs, but businesses too. There’s plenty that have a subreddit, or a Discord, and ideally, setting up a Lemmy or Mastodon instance will be just as easy.
The way to win the Meta war is to make sure people have enough of a reason to venture out of Meta land to come out.
So, anybody know Taylor Swift?
I mean, these people take squarespace sponsorships all the time. Why not practice what they’re preaching? Why not have a website of their own (which I figure most already do) not just to sell merch, but to actually host their own fedi instances?
I’d rather keep all the above OUT because if history is any indicator, inviting these entities will just divide us up more.
My take on this whole thing, “If you’re afraid to play on a level playing field, then you don’t belong in the game.”
