Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@ariadne@treehouse.systems @nova@hachyderm.io Or to put it less generously: "good people working there" are human shields for corporate misconduct, every single time.

@ariadne@treehouse.systems @nova@hachyderm.io Their document (https://github.com/hachyderm/community/blob/main/accounts/corporate-accounts.md) is pretty clear about the intentions:

"If you have been asked to remove your corporate account we ask you to be patient with us as we are currently trying to balance our community as we introduce trust with corporations."

This is absolutely a textbook case of "normalizing corporate presence", and it's just made *worse* by "friends at corporation helping out in exchange for exposure", IMO.

It blurs the lines between the corporate and the personal, creates a corporate dependency, and further allows corporations to encroach upon a community.

Elsewhere in the reply chains, I made a list of corporations which started out as "nice companies" and then grew to become a serious problem.

*Every single one of them* had people defending it because "I know the people working there and they're good people, they're just trying to help". Without exception. It terminated any possibility of criticism or concern.

(I know this because I called out every single one of them early, only to be faced with constant "I'm sure it won't get that bad" and "I know good people there" responses - and ultimately zero action to prevent their harm.)

Well, this wasn't how I was planning to spend the day.

@ariadne@treehouse.systems @nova@hachyderm.io Sure, and your moderation policy is your decision to make. But to reiterate: my concern is primarily about the active efforts to normalize corporate presence on here, which has a community-wide impact.

@ariadne@treehouse.systems @nova@hachyderm.io There is no reason for such accounts to exist on a community instance and try to 'embed' themselves into that community. They can just run their own instance and operate it like an RSS feed.

@ariadne@treehouse.systems @nova@hachyderm.io I do not believe that there is a "balance to be struck" here, personally. Corporate presence here is a strict negative to anyone who isn't a corporation. It can't even serve the "public shaming" purpose that Twitter had, because there's no outrage algorithms here.

@nova@hachyderm.io I'm certain that Hachyderm can receive the benefit of the doubt (eg. I have specifically asked my instance's admin to not defederate *yet*, to see how things play out first), but the same does not apply for corporations.

Corporations have been getting the benefit of the doubt with this sort of thing for decades, uninterruptedly, without exception, and every single time it has played out the same way.

It is well-understood to me why allowing corporations into a community space is a bad idea on a very fundamental and unsolvable level (I have actually expanded on this in various reply chains, like https://social.pixie.town/@joepie91/109360136040004274), with mountains of recurring evidence to show for it. I expect the same to be true for many others in the fediverse.

Corporations, as a group, have simply run out of second chances for us.

I am also not some magical "ruler of the fediverse" with any sort of decisionmaking power - this was genuinely just meant as a heads-up to followers on Hachyderm, based on what I expect the response from the wider fediverse to be as this plays out.

And ultimately, the conclusion remains the same as in my original post: *if* Hachyderm continues to try and get brands onto the fediverse, then I expect it to be pretty widely defederated (and would certainly expect my admin to do so).

That doesn't mean that Hachyderm isn't *allowed* to do this, of course - it is ultimately an open protocol. But defederation is the likely response, and that is something that will have to be accepted in that case.

(I should note that *all* the replies from Hachyderm users so far have been Reply Guys trying to start a debate that I didn't invite them for, which isn't promising...)

@ariadne@treehouse.systems Right, but that difference of "using their own instance" is precisely why that case is different, and why this case is worrying.

The situation with Hachyderm is that it is now instance policy to not only invite corporations but seemingly also to "win their trust in the fediverse" by pandering to their particular desires (see also: maia getting defederated from them).

Plus that the general vibe on the instance seems to be "what's the problem with corporations?", showing an absolute and complete ignorance to *why* people don't want corporations here, and instead trying to dress it up in a lovey-dovey "we're here to support the community" spiel.

*That* is ultimately what makes it a risk for corporate capture. Not the mere presence of corporations, but the active attempts to normalize them as a part of the broader community.