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.
No. Billions of people are not currently moving from Twitter to Mastodon.