The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world
No Stupid Questions@kbin.social
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca
No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz
Yes, it will fracture, but hopefully at the fringes, as you mentioned. So thsie with extreme views find it difficult to get traction due to lack of users or lack of places to post.
It should mean that we don’t get brigading from communities. You can just block them. It should.nean that there are safer communities but they miss out on some content.
At the moment, the only large communities are general. That may change over time. I do hope that companies start their own instances. Not to control the narrative, but to be their official communication. I don’t want commercial users using the community instances.
Again, then, they can be blocked but also, they can be verified.
The issue as I see it is that once Meta or someone similar can start pointing to far right instances, child abuse materials or anything of the like and start painting Lemmy as a whole as the new 4chan “radicalising and grooming the children” only to release their “new app” which is just their instance then the “free fediverse” is going to BE the fringe.
Large companies will have no desire to be involved with “that place” because the sanitised, community guidelines having, data farming goliath will have 2 billion users. Why risk the bad pr?
Why risk the bad PR of being on meta when you can be on your own instance that any other instance can access.
It’s like email. People don’t hold Google responsible if someone emails them with profanity.
I expect there will be sanitised versions and free for all versions. Moderation will differentiate but it may be that it’s send regulated, like porn on NSFW instances.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve blocked the NSFW instance from my feed and any comments from there are blocked too. So users from instances with a lot of NSFW content may find they have less engagement. L it may be that more regulated instances have less freedom of speech but more people to listen.
Likely the realiry will be somewhere in the middle.
I think you have a very optimistic outlook on people. We understand how the fediverse works but I wouldnt trust most people to differentiate between the app and the content it serves.
Perhaps, once legal consequences of comments start kicking in here and there, the Fediverse will tend to remain fragmented to avoid having very large communities that also happen to act as a lightning rod for litigation
Why would they face any legal consequences any more than any other social media? The platform would not be liable for the content of its users. Obviously, they are responsible to remove illegal content, like child porn.
You have to have the ability to advocate for your rights under the law. Even if there are laws saying that the platform is not liable for content of the users, there can still be nuisance suits or prosecutions. Even if those actions are frivolous, it still costs to respond to them. They generally can’t be ignored.
Not more, necessarily, but definitely more exposed as smaller servers won’t have legal and regulatory compliance teams supporting them
Instance location. Content comes at you from all over the Fediverse but once its in your instance it’s actually located on your server. It’s obvious how even regular NSFW stuff can be a problem if your instance is sitting in a ME country but perhaps less obvious (and more troublesome) is text based content.
For instance if a user is enrolled on an instance located in Germany and then subscribes to Neo-Nazi content from an instance located in the United States. That NN material is now on your instance but much of it is probably illegal in Germany. What happens when the German Authorities find out and come knocking?
Even “Child Porn” isn’t nearly as cut and dried as most people think. Things like /c/tinytitties or /c/flatchested from lemmynsfw are arguably illegal in a place like Australia since the person can be perceived as under-age due to their physical characteristics. It gets worse when you toss in the AI Generated stuff.
Big Tech does a lot of juggling trying to stay clear of these problems and they have large legal teams to help them when they run into trouble. I rather doubt that most instance admins have the resources for it.