The GenP subreddit got banned on Reddit. We can only take a guess as to why(I seriously don’t know, please let me know if you do).
But regardless, it brings up a serious question. How will big corpos and nations force their control on lemmy and other fediverse communities?
Places like reddit, twitter, instagram and even “fediverse” bluesky cave to demands from corporates and countries all the time. But what happens when the real fediverse platforms get attention?
How will they ban, sabotage and coerce instances and communities to cave into demands?
I know lemmy and other fediverse platforms are still very small right now, but I believe it’s only time before the sabotage begins. Instagram stepping into the territory tells you how scared zuck already is.
And How will we get around this?
Apart from running many instances which keeps copies of other communities which happens automatically when a user on an instance subscribes to a community; organize larger instances into well funded non-profits that can weather attacks. Lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works and Lemmy.world already have non-profits formed. An example of what this could look like is the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously won’t be as wealthy at least not in the short term.
That actually sounds like a great idea. However, I feel like that won’t be enough to stop countries from wanting to ban fediverse platforms outright(if they decide to do so). I even read a news article talking about the how the current US administration doesn’t like Wikipedia because they are spreading “propoganda”. Or like how thy are trying to force change in independent universities by cutting their funding.
We can’t stop sovereign countries from banning services. We can however have external Fediverse services not comply with cutting off access to users from those sovereign countries, leaving it up them to ensure their citizens don’t have access. Since we’re not making off of doing business in those countries we can ignore non-legal requests instead of voluntarily complying. Then some of the more technical people in such places could use the existing tools for blocking circumvention in order to access the Fediverse if they really want to.