Why the fediverse will get corrupted
Any federated platform: Mastodon, Friendica, Peertube, Pixelfed, you name it - will get as corrupted as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and the like if the trade society we live in takes a hold of them. What do I mean by that?If your platform is based on trades, it means that it wants something from the users (a trade). Their currency (say a subscription for access or for more features, a badge and such), their data (it collects the user data and trades it for currency or influence and the like), or attention (will insert ads into the platform). These are the methods used to trade in the online world. And any federated platform is subject to these practices.
When any platform engages into trades with their users, the balance of motivation tilts. And the owners of that instance will have to prioritize whatever it is traded (data, currency, attention). And you guessed it, they will become just like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. Business as usual, quite literally.
Does not matter that these platforms are "federated" since big instances can user their influence and power to keep users on their platforms. Can stop defederating with any other platform and force their users to only use the instance via their own trade-based apps.
This is what we are trying to scream about at TROM for the past 10+ years. Everything gets eventually corrupted by TRADE. Nature, websites, people, projects. Everything.
Read The Origin of Most Problems book where we detail all of it.
So don't get fooled by "federation", "open source", and the like. All of them can and are being corrupted by this trade based society. Therefore we need trade-free platforms more than open source or federated ones, so that we remove the bad incentive of trade. Trade-free can also be federated and open source, and in fact it encourages these other practices.