I think the real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community is that, should Mastodon really become the "next Twitter", it will catch the attention of the other FAANGs. And the way the Fediverse is structured currently, it appears highly vulnerable to the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish playbook:
1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into your existing platform. ("We love the Fediverse! We love it so much that we've built native support for it into Google mail. That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!")
1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]
2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it! And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions living standard. Feedback is encouraged!")
2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users.
3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore, ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com. Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API console and apply for a key...")
I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
While this is an entirely plausible (even likely) idea, I don't think it would play out that way. Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. In this scenario, Google will be defederated from the rest of the network, along with all their users.
Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.
I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.
> some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer
The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing".
A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only".
> I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening
Mastodon has a configurable robots.txt. Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines.
The big thing is instances can want their public timelines indexed but not their "followers only" timelines.
> A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only".
Well, there goes thinking I can always just host my own instance, I probably wouldn't be active enough for their tastes. And it adds another concern to joining a smaller instance, seems like I have to rely on other users to make it look more legit if I don't want to be so centralized. Or are they looking for very strictly, literally "lurker only" instances?
Not a Mastodon user, but I'd imagine most admins follow common sense.
If your server only has a handful of accounts that obviously correspond to you and your friends, I don't see why anyone would have a problem with that.
On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion.
> On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion.
Existing Twitter and Facebook connections (names, followers, friends, etc) to create many secret indexer servers made of easily verifiable Google searches of real people with real friends and GPT-like toot generation to fake just enough activity seems like a pretty straightforward route to avoid suspicion.
Mastodon does have some verification tools. One example is rel="me" link verification on profiles. That's not impossible to fake, but it's another thing that makes it harder to just impersonate "real people with real friends".
On top of that, arguably Mastodon is full of weird people who often don't look all that like real people and find themselves trying to be their weirdest selves (which is also why protecting the privacy courtesies on Mastodon is seen as important). Instances looking too much like Twitter or Facebook data are suspicious in their own ways.
> Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
There will always be bad actors, but that's not excuse to ignore common courtesy, throw your hands up, and just claim all private data is public. Mastodon isn't Twitter. Mastodon isn't intended to be 100% public. There is data with an expectation of privacy. Just because people can violate that expectation doesn't mean it isn't private data.
A common analogy here is conversation in public restaurants: just because the restaurant itself is open to the public and serves anyone doesn't give you license to eavesdrop on any conversation you want inside of that restaurant. There's generally an expectation of privacy among the other diners. (And in the real world someone trying that might get their ass beat for trying it.)
There's always an "everyone blocks me and no one likes me" fear in hosting your own instance, and yes you will run the risk of preemptive blocks if people don't like how your instance looks.
The particular combo here, though, is "lurker only instance" that also spams follow requests. If you don't spam follow requests and are selective about who you follow (like a human rather than a bot), you have less risk of this specific paranoia. Lurkers are fine to many Mastodon users. Lurkers spamming following requests are a concern.
Not in my experience. I'm on a tiny instance and follows are so rare in general, I can watch them all individually.
There are many users that require follow requests where they verify/vet every single follow.
> It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks?
Maybe such that one person doesn't notice, but remember the scale here: if someone is trying to "follow the world" maliciously, they have to make sure that they pass the quick checks of every paranoid person they try to follow. Once a malicious site is "discovered" the #fediblock hash tag moves pretty virally to encourage other paranoid users/instances to (re-)evaluate the bad actor.
> Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed
(Courteous) Instances don't allow you to boost a Followers Only post to the Public timeline.
Discourteous instances may exist, but when they are found out, they are generally blocked (again, the #fediblock hashtag sometimes moves swiftly and virally here).
There's no "Fediblock central list". At the moment it's just a search hashtag that federates with other toots (it federates as toots because it is just toots). It is entirely up to instance admins what they do with what they see in that hashtag.
ActivityPub makes it easy to crawl and index the whole Fediverse, you don't even need to start a server. I played with the idea a bit before I learned more about the community. If you're being intentionally malicious, disguising your traffic as legit shouldn't be impossible
> The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing".
Yeah, their culture doesn't sound very... sane from these descriptions. Neurotic about weird stuff, like someone linking to them.
I would say that says more about your preconceptions than their sanity. There's nothing wrong with people wanting spaces with different rules. That's why they built their own space, after all
Built, currently host, manage access to, and block malicious actors from too.
Some instances don't even allow non-logged in users to view public toots, good luck scraping those toots without sendingba follow request (which will be seen by the account and server admin.
Authorized fetch makes it impossible to do this without either scraping the web interface (which some instances turn off (it's one switch in the settings)) or using a followbot which will get you #fediblocked immediately. RE: Search results, instances have a per-user option to add a noindex meta tag to your posts on the web interface.
> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit.
sure, but it's being loaded up with piles of users who were perfectly happy with corporate bullshit two weeks ago. you're not going to make cultural converts of them before some bright eyed product manager at google spots this opportunity.
in fact, you'll probably _never_ convert them. they'll probably convert the rest of the place. hence "eternal september".
Instance admins ultimately control whether registrations are open, and can disable accounts of those users that aren't participating in the instance in a healthy manner.
Additionally, expecting Google to have the fortitude of the fediverse when it comes to social media is hilarious
We're coming up on year 6 of the ActivityPub standard, and there are plenty of half decade long fediverse participants like myself. If this were Google I would have been through at least one if not two major platform changes (where you generally lose features & your social graph) or a platform shutdown by now.
The comparison is apt, but you can ignore the federated timeline if your instance is what you came for. From what I understand though, the on-instance caching could be problematic if there is a sudden massive increase in user numbers (and people from your instance start following them)
I've hosted my own email server for almost a decade now.
My DNS provider offers a free email account for your domain, but that's the easy way.
I rent a VPS for like $15/yr and run everything myself. Setting up an email server takes like half an afternoon if you follow a good tutorial.
I can't say that Gmail being the biggest provider has had any effect on my email server. I'm not really sure how it would, apart from Google deciding to block private email servers somehow.
This of course is nonsense. It takes some effort to host your own, but you can do it, and there are hundreds of email providers out there. And there is the middle ground of getting your own domain and “hosting” your own for $6/month with Microsoft 365 for example…
I recall reading here a guy complaining that self hosted emails we're super prone to blocking because they didn't come from a reputable Domain/address, and weren't whitelisted from some of the big guys
Which is kind of the problem, if you need to be approved by the Big guys, there's not much of a point of calling open and fair
You still can host for sure, but the moment M$/Gmail, blocks you, you've lost contact with half the people
IP and ASN reputation really matters, as does having SPF, DMARC, DKIM and Email Feedback Loop (FBL) properly configured.
That being said, there are production mail servers on OVH (bad reputation mail wise) that deliver plenty of mail to Microsoft, Google and Apple mail servers every day.
> Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.
Kinda puzzled by this. Who's out there posting to the open Fediverse with no expectation that their posts are going to be seen, indexed, and possibly archived? It's like publishing a web page and expecting that search engines won't index it.
Just like with other services, you should expect that anything you post to the Fediverse will be there forever, tucked away in databases, indexed by search engines, and outlive you. Even more so, since editing or deleting Fediverse posts is more like a polite request than an actual command; some servers ignore such requests even if your home server complied.
That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.
And this is precisely the sort of thing that sets apart community-run projects like the fediverse (!= Mastodon) apart from for-profit platforms like Twitter. The fediverse culture is based around consent and guarding each other's safety. That means that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean that people will accept you doing so.
And that is precisely what happened here. Someone started indexing all the posts of a group of largely vulnerable and marginalized folks, without asking for their consent, without trying to understand the community norms, just barging in and doing what they felt like without concern for the consequences to other people's safety.
They got swiftly ejected from the community accordingly.
If you truly believe that it's okay to index things just because "well, I can technically access it" without any further consideration, then to put it bluntly: you are a threat to the safety of marginalized folks, and you are not welcome in those spaces. You should also consider that there are plenty of people who cannot afford to take such a cavalier attitude as you.
> That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.
This is certainly true. The fediverse is not a replacement for Twitter, and it is not meant to be. The toxic Twitter culture is not wanted there. That of course doesn't stop media outlets from completely ignoring that and going for the quickest headline.
> The fediverse culture is based around consent and guarding each other's safety.… If you truly believe that it's okay to index things just because "well, I can technically access it" without any further consideration, then to put it bluntly: you are a threat to the safety of marginalized folks, and you are not welcome in those spaces. You should also consider that there are plenty of people who cannot afford to take such a cavalier attitude as you.
This just makes no sense. You can't paint a message on a billboard and then get angry when cars driving by can read it. If a group of people wants to post messages secretly amongst themselves, the Fediverse is the wrong place to do it. Use Telegram or a private Discord server or something, but even then screenshot leaks are bound to happen eventually.
If you are truly concerned about the safety of "vulnerable folks," you should be all for educating them on the true workings of the internet so that they can avoid publishing things they don't want the world to see. You are saying it's fine for them to use a system whose stated purpose is blasting messaged all across the internet to whoever wants to see them and then expecting all the recipients to know about and follow the unwritten rules they are somehow bound to when handling that message. That is not a realistic expectation.
Followers only posts and requiring followers to be approved by the account they are following is common on the Fediverse.
This is what vulnerable folks I follow do to protect themselves, along with their instance admins often blackholing (IP tables dropping & blocking in their instance config) shit holes like https://freespeechextremist.com
I say this as a person banned by https://freespeechextremist.com , apparently my toots on that Pleroma instance should have been racist, and most other speech is unacceptable there.
Let's assume for a moment that mastodon is growing still. If Google adds it to everybody with a Gmail account, then hardly anybody will sign up for a non-Google server. It's easy to imagine a world in which most people are accessing via Google's servers.
> for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit
That will entirely work in favour of big companies. If there was a split and only one split is capable of serving 100 million users that split will win.
It might win in the sense that that would then also be a thing that exists, but would not necessarily mean that Mastodon can no longer be what it is now, I don't think?
By Google talk I meant all its successor like hangouts and google chat. It's more like they moved its users to new service rather than killing it. Same with facebook messenger, which supported XMPP.
Sure yeah XMPP is surviving but it's nowhere close to Google chat or FB messenger.
It's kind of having a renaissance as more people discover the world outside of walled gardens. Platforms die eventually, internet standards are here to stay.
I think it will be very hard if not impossible for any entity to have a widespread effect on the larger fediverse, simply because we can defederate problematic servers.
The moment a Google instance comes online, a lot of servers will block it on principle. Then every time they do something new and scummy, more servers will block them. Eventually, enough of the network will have defederated from them that they just don't have any reach outside of their own server.
Not to mention that based on google's history, a mastodon server would last for maybe a year before Google gets bored and kills it.
Sure, google could set up a server with a billion people, but how can that have an effect when nobody outside of that server sees any of it?
If you wanted to force change on the fediverse, it'd probably have to be a massive undercover grassroots campaign. I'm talking spinning up hundreds of instances with a few thousand users each, and don't let anyone know that those instances are owned by Google. Then you play the long game where your users slowly influence other instances.
I just don't see that happening.
Every server in the fediverse is independent, and has its own culture. Thinking Google could cause change to all of those individual cultures is like saying if you put a few billion people in a new country it would change the global culture. Technically, yes, that could work on paper, but it doesn't really work in practice. Not on the sort of timescale any corporation is willing to invest in.
A lot of the examples in this thread are focusing too much on Google; Google will probably never touch another social network.
What is more likely is some new company comes around, VC backed with some "ActivityPub-for-the-masses" pitch. This startup first comes with development resources; all the sudden 90% of the devs on Mastodon2 are employed by $startup. Not only that but they begin to build very polished native apps which aren't OSS. Because all the developers are $startup, the development process becomes less democratic. Then the VC dollars create marketing; then all your new users equate ActivityPub with $startup2. All the non-technical users are on $startup. Then they hit some critical mass and pull up the ladder. You find out 70% of the people you follow were on $startup, because for them it was easier to use the polished thing, and that 70% won't go back to ActivityPub, because all the people are now on $startup and maybe you should just ditch your crummy server and get with the times. It happens slowly, then quickly.
All of the sudden mastodon looks like IRC in a world where everyone uses Discord.
>> "The moment a Google instance comes online, a lot of servers will block it on principle. Then every time they do something new and scummy, more servers will block them. Eventually, enough of the network will have defederated from them that they just don't have any reach outside of their own server."
The journa.host guy is speed running this just by accident of trying to figure everything out from inside the fire.
I don't know about that. Google has a bunch of services that I can access through the "gmail" account I signed up for in 2003. But I don't use almost any of them. If they added a mastodon to that, I would hardly notice.
Even in that case, I don't think it would happen. The only reason Mastodon is becoming "popular" is dissatisfaction with the way Elon Musk is running Twitter, and that's just a minority of the userbase. It's not like everyone went back to Usenet when Google started archiving it.
And this in a nutshell is why Mastodon will always be niche and will never be a twitter replacement. Indexing every post is good and would be a solution to one of the biggest problems with Mastodon: discovering people to follow.
As it currently stands Mastodon is a very toxic community of people in the sense that they don't care at all about what the average person actually wants or needs in a network like this. Any and all complaints or comments pointing out the problems with usability are met with exactly the sort of hostility you describe here.
Hell, even as a very technical person I can't find anyone to follow on Mastodon other than developers. There was some large index of the most popular mastodon servers so I tried that and the top entry in the health category was an antivaxer spreading misinformation.
Honestly what we need is a twitter replacement, centralized, with search and recommendations. Perhaps run by a non-profit council or something.
I think Mastodon or a subset of it can evolve into what you want. We'll start seeing specialized servers that vet their members. As Elon drives people away, you'll see more technical people, more serious medical people and the like.
Is your username a reference to the Minecraft server? /offtopic
This is already happening somewhat. There's at least one server I can think of off the top of my head which is invite only, and purpose focused. Hoping to get an account there eventually, though I won't say the name and drive unneeded attention to it.
Truth Social, one of the biggest private Twitter competitors with 4 million users (although obviously not appealing to Muskfugees because it’s essentially a playground for Trump and his supporters), is literally just a Mastodon instance with federation removed. It’s already happening
The difference is that Truth Social never intended to federate, while Gab was defederated and isolated by the community. You can still federate with Gab if you own your server.
Yeah, of course you're right. I just meant that Gab is also just a Mastodon instance, what people might not know.
I should've been more precise in my previous comment.
this is really interesting thanks for the links! venture communism isn't an idea i've come across and i'm intrigued. i dont think capitalism can abide being bought out and transferred by a bunch of anti-capitalist actors but its a new project and that's good!
This is kinda what happened with Mastodon wrt to ActivityPub. Lots of what the Fediverse means is how Mastodon chooses to use the protocols. Often in ways that aren't even compliant with the specifications. So yep EEE is highly viable as an attack.
Pixiv doesn't own them anymore so not sure if that still happens, but I do know Japanese users can't reach a lot of the rest of the universe because admins like randomly blocking their entire servers.
It's not "random". Some servers have legal concerns about the art they host, but also last I checked their moderation in general wasn't great (not sure if it was a "no english-speaking moderators" problem or a "we don't care" problem though.)
the reason is because pawoo and baraag are de-facto lolicon servers with neither the censorship requirements of pixiv or the content moderation of twitter.
servers in different countries are going to have different laws and different cultural mores so you will no longer have the twitter model of curating the world's content by the standards of California progressivism which will probably also result in a far more fractured set of communities. considering the kinds of harassment artists are subject to on twitter, i don't even know if that is a bad thing.
My average Twitter moderation experience is getting an email back saying my reported tweet from RomanStatue1488 saying “The Jews took this from us” with a picture of 50s nostalgia art didn’t break any rules. (Direct quote.)
California has little to do with it. You won’t be nearly as happy with a site run under the laws of a non-US country though.
Server blocks are not "random", and they are very much a part of how the fediverse functions. It's also what disincentivizes creating large effectively-unmoderatable instances, because you will very quickly find yourself isolated from the rest of the network. This is by design, not a bug - the fediverse is not meant to be a "town square".
> 1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]
Imo, that's a W for Mastodon, not a L.
> I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't folks at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this? Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!
Our countermeasure is that in Matrix you can’t build gatekeepers, as conversations replicate between the participating servers. You can’t talk to someone on another server without literally sharing ownership of that conversation with them. Now everyone could chose to congregate on a single server (e.g. matrix.org has about 35% of the users on Matrix right now, given it’s the default) but there is no advantage to doing so.
Meanwhile we’re building out P2P Matrix to avoid being dependent in servers altogether: arewep2pyet.com
I mean, if that's it... Imagine WhatsApp or iMessage allowing their users to talk to Matrix, but not make it as easy to find people there as on their own services. People who might've been tempted to join Matrix before would probably no longer be, because they'll feel they can get all that with their existing service, while they'd still pressure Matrix users to join that service because the experience is subpar from their perspective.
It works both ways. With an open network, someone can build a better client than WA or iMessage and then there is social pressure to converge on the better one. The best app ends up winning rather than the one with the biggest walled garden. The consumers win; complacent gatekeepers lose.
Thanks for chiming in! But the problem I see here is that WA or iMessage (or whatever incumbent) needn't be fully open on a network. They can give themselves access to the open network, without fully opening up their own network to the rest of the network, and then by virtue of being the incumbent, thereby prevent better clients from taking off. (And that, of course, is the embrace & extend part. Once they're the dominant player again...)
True, network effects are hard to beat, but one better hope the network builds around the product one themselves built around their federated protocol.
While I love XMPP, it suffered from being just too early. And therefore lacking crucial features like e2e encryption, voice, video, etc. All of those are "possible" but all as afterthought, plugin or bolted on. Never a natural part of the core.
xmpp doesn't really have a core - even the messages are more or less an extension. The whole point of xmpp is "each to his own extend", so your "missing features" are in reality "nice addons that most clients have but if you'd like to bring your own homebrew that's fine too" which is how I think more networks should operate. Have the features, but gracefully fall back when the client's don't support them.
The core is deliberately small and is meant to be built upon and not be a opionated and monolithic. Such a protocol will become obsolete rather quickly if standardized.
The features you mentioned are not just possible in theory, but have been implemented by more modern clients.
This is 100% what Substack is doing to email newsletters right now. It doesn’t look exactly the same, and they’re not doing it with technical standards but with additional features, but the framework is very similar. They’re on step 2.
Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?
>can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?
Yes, you can always defederate from other instances if you want. In fact, a lot of fediverse instances do just that to protect their hugboxes from the rest of us who actually value our ability to communicate with each other. And there are certainly a number of instances that defederate from others on technical grounds rather than social ones.
I'm sure there's a nicer way of saying that. I've worried that I would end up in an echo chamber of my own on there, but saying things like "hugbox" are unnecessarily rude to people who have tended to prefer isolation because of the effect the world has on them. We can't choose how others react to content, but we shouldn't chastise them for wanting to protect themselves from harm, even if we don't agree with the definition of harm.
I think hugboxes sound nice. It took me a moment to realise it was meant pejoratively. I guess the most famous "hugbox" in that sense, is Truth Social.
In any case, instances full of trolls, spammers and nazis also tend to get blocked by others who prefer to communicate normally. Blocking serves a useful function. If FAANG servers show up, I'm sure some would block them out of principle. Others once they start breaking the protocol.
> I guess the most famous "hugbox" in that sense, is Truth Social.
It isn't. "Hugbox" is used pejoratively specifically to attack people with perceived left wing beliefs and associations. The idea is that people who aren't interested in seeing a ton of transphobic content or whatever are too "soft" to expose themselves to "real conversation."
"Echo chamber" is more neutral in orientation, though still carries a negative connotation. "Hugbox" is specifically slanted.
Even so, Truth Social is the most notable Mastodon instance that blocks everybody else, and from what I've heard, also quite aggressively kicks out people with differing opinions. It's quite explicitly an echo chamber that shields them from opinions they disagree with.
As for not wanting to see transphobic content, I think that's entirely a reasonable position. People shouldn't tolerate abuse. Abuse != "real conversation".
I agree with you that not wanting to see transphobic content is a reasonable position. And yet, I've had a number of people tell me that I'm against free speech for this belief. Heck, I've got a nonbinary friend who teaches at a local university and TPUSA kids all take their class specifically so they can harass my friend with bigoted speech and then whine about their free speech being under attack if anything is done about it.
Yeah, abuse is not speech. There's a difference between voicing your opinion and harassing someone. What's more, harassing someone is often done with the intent to silence them. And even if it's not the intent, it's often the result. Harassers are not defending free speech, they're attacking it.
And even apart from that, I think everybody has a right to choose who they associate with, and that does not have to include harassers. That's more relevant to social media and less to teaching classes of course, which do need to be open to everybody. But if you're choosing to follow a class with the specific purpose to harass someone, there's something deeply wrong with you.
Hugboxes go both ways. mstdn.social is as much a hugbox for the left as Gab and Truth Social are hugboxes for the right. They're all anathema to free speech.
I would expect that Google would quickly get the Gab treatment if they decided to go fedi (that is, everyone preemptively blocks/defederates from them before they even have AP support enabled).
This is a valid use case for a corporate instance of a server. If a big corporation did invite a mass of users to the platform, it would still be a win for the platform in my book. The platform itself doesn't specify any restrictions on big servers just because the owners of these big servers are bringing in new users that they have influence over. Deeming a valid utilization of a platform as a 'real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community' misses the point.
Everyone pointing out the examples to email are exactly right. If Google hadn't botched the Buzz launch, this would've been a perfect time to introduce it.
I wouldn't be suprised to see ActivityFlow™ or such at AWS, some PAAS activity-pub server that can be connected to lambda, kinesis, etc etc to "add your product to the fediverse - infinately scalable (€0.002 per in- or outbox activity)".
Naturally, that would be a proprietary service. Or a service lifted off github and extended - the patches never streaming back upstream.
1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into your existing platform. ("We love the Fediverse! We love it so much that we've built native support for it into Google mail. That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!")
1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]
2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it! And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions living standard. Feedback is encouraged!")
2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users.
3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore, ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com. Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API console and apply for a key...")
I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
[1] https://financesonline.com/number-of-active-gmail-users/