Fediverse

Companies can host Mastodon (or Lemmy or whatever) on their own domain. That way they have control over the instance and it implicitly verifies their account as official. Raspberry Pi already do this (raspberrypi.social).

I keep seeing that acronym EEE, forgive my ignorance but what does it mean in this context?

It is, but it's not likely as lots of them are in it only for the money.

I think the Fediverse should be seen as two distinct parts: one that hosts user accounts and provides a user interface, and one that publishes content and provides discussion space.

Ideally, the first would remain independent from major companies, while the second would become universal for all web content.

I think this is very hard at this point. Manny Fediverse communities are quite small and fear that their community will be flooded with content from any external platform. We even saw this when a lot of Reddit users came over to Lemmy. So in those cases there will be a lot of distrust.

Smaller companies could easily use a more strictly controlled* Lemmy instance to provide a space for their community. That would allow people to interact with that community without having to setup a new account. *Tightly moderated and limited to admin created communities.

But anything large will just be distrusted as long as the platform is much larger than large Fediverse instances. Maybe EU law could help to protect the Fediverse from EEE. But EU law also moves slow, and we don't want laws slowing down the growth of the Fediverse either.

I think the best we can hope for in the long-term is an email-like adoption.

Individuals self-hosting major servers on donation money is not sustainable. This sucks for the people for whom this is "what Lemmy is", but it's the truth. There will come a time when Lemmy-at-large gets so big that Lemmy.world has to close (or de-federate), as users and content will outgrow voluntary revenue.

What we can hope for is that Lemmy is not taken over by one huge corporate instance, but instead 3-4 competing, inter-federated corporate instances. A Meta instance, a Google instance, and a Bytedance instance, for example. In addition to these, smaller (non-social-media) companies and institutions (game companies, universities, political organizations, etc.) would run their own Lemmy instances for the benefit of their members and users.

I think it could work if companies followed EEE but just stopped at the 2nd E. They should only embrace and extend and the extensions they implement should be available for everyone. But that's probably more of a pipe dream than anything.