Does anyone remember this famous viral video?: ["This is extremely dangerous to our democracy"](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo). A creepy montage of a wide range of local channels repeating the same message, reminiscent of *1984* and other dystopias. For those who haven't read it (just download free copies online),[ *Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent) by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988, with revisions) is a book which proposed a propaganda model explaining the trends and behaviors of the US mass media system, not just how they are influenced by government but even more how economic and social influences promote this behavior without overt coercion or state censorship. It uses a variety of major historical examples, and later editions preface with discussions of the increasing centralization/consolidation of media companies and their move to the internet. It's an excellent and influential book, and an Orwell Award winner. ##### But about *CONSPIRACY* A conspiracy is when participants have a secret *plan* or *agreement* to some harmful or illegal purpose[[wiki]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy), such as the [Business Plot (1933)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot) by various corporations and [COINTELPRO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO) by the FBI. In *Manufacturing Consent*, the creators explicitly declare that their model does not rely on conspiratorial reasoning: that the propagandist patterns of mass media are all a result of an explicit conspiracy which all the major perpetrators are co-operating with. Instead, they argue that a variety of uncoordinated but systematic external factors create a pressure for media to encourage and discourage certain types of content. They define and justify five main 'filters' that determine the content we see: - **Size, ownership, and profit orientation of dominant media outlets**: they must cater to the financial interests of the owners such as corporations and controlling investors. - **Advertising**: almost all revenue needed for them to *survive* comes from advertising, so media must cater to advertiser's political and economic desires. - **Sourcing mass media news**: larger and more aligned media outlets get special access to many routine news sources like government announcements and large organizations in a mutual benefit situation. Other news sources are more expensive and risky to access by nature, and the large routine ones can arbitrarily exclude media publishers they don't like, especially those non-mainstream. This encourages mainstream media to seek those routine sources, creating a bias in what facts they receive. - **Flak**: legal, social or reputational harassment is expensive and damages advertising revenue. It is often conducted by powerful, private influence groups like think tanks. Even if not explicitly a conspiracy, they often still align incidentally. This threat to media outlets deters reporting certain facts or opinions - **National enemies**: during the Cold War, anti-communism created a social filter that not only affected communism, but rather anything considered remotely related such as socially-progressive policies, civil rights, and being opposed to the invasion in Vietnam, along with impacts on how news criticized Nicaragua's democratic elections while unanimously legitimizing El Salvador's extreme violent repression and corruption as democratic. After the fall of the USSR, this was replaced with the War on Terror as the major social control mechanism, affecting reporting on the recent conflicts in the Middle East. (more quick explanation and justification for those who haven't yet read the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model ) The point of that list being, the mass media organizations, government, think tanks and advertisers all have their own motivations and don't ***require*** a conspiracy or overt government coercion to cause the censorship and propaganda they create. They *individually* have agendas and abuse their power or profit or influence, but the model's creators argue that there is no need to blame a real conspiracy for this behavior. An interesting side effect is that these induce self-censorship and a bias in sources where the writers usually haven't been told not to write about something, it's simply not economically viable and discouraged independently by each large media outlet, leading to an unorganized but systematic system of propaganda that discourages criticism of the state and of major businesses. What are your thoughts on this? Do you believe it's justified to claim the mass media's biases largely aren't conspiratorial, or would you debate otherwise? Do you think this is comparable to the alt-right concept of "Deep State" or that DS theory implies the hidden shadow conspiracy that this denounces?

Related question: ["Can the Fediverse fall to ruling class / corporate control?"](https://lemmy.ml/post/245772) For those who don't know about EEE, I highly recommend reading at least [the Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish), which includes many examples of Microsoft intentionally trying to do it to open standards like CSS and Java. As an open standard with [relatively few developers](https://lemmy.ml/post/245772/comment/169002), most part-time/casual, spread over many applications, ActivityPub seems like an inevitable target once as it continues to grow. Take a hypothetical example where Elon Musk owning Twitter continues to cause a sustained rush to Mastodon, causing one of Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter to use their large amount of organized resources to clone Mastodon's software, rebrand it, fix the most popular issues in the to-do list, make the server more efficient to host, allow bridging to Twitter (if it's Twitter making it), host it on their fast infrastructure, hire professional moderators and add many of the denied feature requests for making it more Twitter-like. With those companies' capital and established tech teams, most or all of those can be done rapidly. So, I predict if they did, many users and even some hosts would be encouraged to use this extended 'better' software or it may even be advertised and popularized as the simplest, easiest and fastest option, centralizing the bulk of ActivityPub users. They can then use this dominant position to extend ActivityPub in various ways, making various competitors incompatible and increasingly unable to federate. Extend beyond Fediverse competitors' reach, and extinguish them by excluding them from a gradually closing garden filled with activity and popular content producers. Sure, it won't affect the more passionate 'early adopters' here as much who are more than merely annoyed by centralized services, but it's an issue that could potentially prevent these alternatives from gaining a popular audience among the more mainstream crowd who would enjoy the benefits provided it didn't require much sacrifice. An interesting (even if not truly qualifying) example is Gab, a Mastodon fork aimed at an alt-right audience. I recall on Fediverse stats sites, there were a few tiny pods of Gab instances and a small but real network of federating Pleroma and Mastodon instances. I found a comment made over a year ago saying *"Gab ripped their federation code a while ago. Also, when they were federating, they never cared much about properly federating. They used federation as an argument to switching platforms but they didn't care about it."* and some users on a Pleroma instance that formerly federated with Gab was mocking them as recent as one hour ago as *"quit[ting] the fedi because they were getting made fun of [by actual free speech platform users]"*. Gab seemingly embraced the concept, unintentionally, of Embrace and Extend and then privatizing, although with (I assert) no intent nor capacity to extinguish. But what if they did have that intent, either financially or politically? What if they were a *purely* profit-driven project that saw the Fedis as a threat? ##### How can these projects counter EEE? I don't think outpacing is a feasible approach, due to constraints that these non-profit, anti-exploitative projects are bound by. *note: This does work both ways, to a degree, in that for-profit projects will need to have annoying things like ads or dodgy manipulative practices to survive unless they want to run at a significant loss, as an investment. I'm not sure how much most people care about those normalized annoyances, so I don't think that should be relied on. FOSS projects aren't well-known for being successful in the mainstream through their purity and ideals.* Boycotting and ostracization (like, to generalize, Mastodon with Gab, then Gab with Pleroma) might be effective so long as they don't gain an independent dominance through bringing more external users and continuing to dilute the values of the Fediverse. But if their new platform becomes more productive and fun then the Fediverse, then the Fediverse will remain only a niche. I don't have faith in a legal solution, but that is my naïve view, I don't know enough about anti-competitive laws, especially internationally. I'm interested to hear what approaches there might be to what I see as a potential and increasingly imminent threat. Links to existing conversations are welcome too: no need to invent the wheel for me ;)

What are some examples of grouping in the Fediverse? This question is in response to a post asking about how to stop corporate dominance in the Fediverse, but unrelated examples are more than welcome. One example is a (defunct?) alliance between 3 national Peertube instances where they agreed to backup each others databases and have similar moderation rules. It would be interesting to see if there's any agreements between instances to block certain instances, like corporate-run (pawoo) or alt-tech (gab) beyond merely using a shared blocklist.

Note: in hindsight, half of this post is answering my own questions as I explore this rarer side of federation, but there are still some remaining questions which I have highlighted. ##### Introduction This post is created on lemmy.ml. The benefits of federating this post to other Lemmy instances is immediately obvious, since they can use most or all of the site features to read it as intended and interact (voting, replying, reporting, saving, cross-posting or browsing and subscribing to fediverse@lemmy.ml). There is also intuitive benefit in being able to federate with other link aggregators such as lotide and Prismo instances. All these sites have the same basic interface of link-posting, text-posting, voting, commenting and voting on comments. The base format is very compatible, even if extra features are not. I wouldn't be surprised if Lemmy and lotide form a dynamic similar to Mastodon and Pleroma, two microblogging services which again have an intuitive base compatibility. ##### But what about different types? What are the benefits of, for example, making Lemmy federate with Mastodon, Friendica or PeerTube? One approach to answering that is asking what cross-interaction is already possible, like some posts in [!feditolemmy](https://lemmy.ml/c/feditolemmy) which were posted from Friendica. This [nerdica.net post](https://nerdica.net/display/a85d7459-9262-6029-68aa-550236192028) which is [also replicated on !fediverse](https://lemmy.ml/post/238040) shows a conversation in replies between a few Lemmy instances and a Friendica account, and demonstrates the clear analogue of our communities and their forums, and of our votes and their likes (it's just a test ;) )  So Friendica posts federating to Lemmy makes reasonable sense. I'm not sure about the opposite. I guess their posts are analogous to our text posts or text & link posts, so it might be possible to render their forums as browsable communities here. **Question 1: Does my Lemmy account browsing and making new posts on Friendica forums make sense?** Or will the federation only make sense for enabling Lemmy to aggregate Friendica posts and allowing cross-rating and cross-commenting? Note: I found [this Friendica forum on Lemmy](https://lemmy.ml/c/retrocomputing@nerdica.net), which was properly interpreted as a community instead of a user by Lemmy, but posts aren't replicating yet. I'm guessing it's a base for future completion to allow further cross-integration. Friendica does not appear to be able to browse Lemmy users or communities yet. I also assume microblogging sites like Mastodon and Pleroma, along with the Prismo link aggregator, can use hashtags as an analogy for communities. While a post on those sites can belong to multiple tags, Lemmy can imitate this with crossposting in multiple communities. Is this reasonable? PeerTube is where I get more confused, and [I'm not alone](https://lemmy.ml/post/154977/). As a reply there mentioned, we can view a PeerTube user account, such as https://lemmy.ml/u/thelinuxexperiment@tilvids.com and https://lemmy.ml/c/h3h3productions@h3h3.club , although it doesn't seem to work for framatube.org. However the interfaces of Lemmy and PeerTube are radically different, as PeerTube is foremost a video hosting site and Lemmy is a link aggregator. I think it's fair to assert that a Lemmy post cannot be displayed on a PeerTube instance without hacks no-one wants, which leaves PeerTube->Lemmy posting, and mutual liking/commenting/reporting/etc.. A PeerTube video can be adapted as a link post in Lemmy. I'm not certain how a PeerTube upload would signal which communities it should be posted to in Lemmy, but there are reasonable options like an extra field in the upload settings, or a link in the description. **Question 2: Is there a plan to have anything more than PeerTube creating link posts in Lemmy communities with federation between comment sections?** Trying to learn the current situation in order to ask good questions has taught me a lot, I was in a mindset that we had to be able to make posts on other sites in order to usefully federate, when that isn't really our role as a link aggregator site. Media sites can usefully post to here with federated voting and comment sections.