Let’s say Lemmy acquires the critical mass of users, continues to gain in popularity. Eventually someone will offer a large sum of money, the platform grows, new owners look towards an IPO, the goals shift, yadayada… How is different this time?
Offer a large sum of money to whom and for what? To an instance owner? Okay, take your instance, the users will migrate as soon as you start making changes that they don’t like and you can’t stop them. Also, good luck monztising it because either you have the same problem reddit had in that third party apps don’t show ads, or you disguise ads as content and now your users hate you and migrate away.
To the développers? To do what exactly? If it’s to make the source code private, tough luck not only are they not allowed to do that thanks to the licence, but also that would be literally impossible due to the amount of copies. If it’s to implement changes to make money, as soon as instance owners, who are users and are interested in not having their users migrate away from their instance, see that, they won’t update and someone will continue making something out of the last good copy of the source code, forking it.
There is effectively no path for someone to pay to take over lemmy, apart from bribing every user (and even that wouldn’t prevent me from taking the bribe and just going back to what we were doing)
Every single Lemmy instance could theoretically be doomed to repeat Reddit’s path. Including the flagship instance, lemmy.ml. Theoretically.
However, once said instance is going downhill, people would be far less affected. Because only a fraction of the users and communities will be in that instance; most of them will be elsewhere. And since the instances work under the same protocol, it would be way easier to move the info elsewhere too.
And the admins of those instances know it. That discourages them to be abusive towards their own users, because unlike the Reddit admins they can’t rely on people coming back.
That’s the beauty of the Fediverse. We aren’t putting all our eggs inside the same basket, but even then we can make a tasty omelette together with all of them.
I think there needs to be a way to migrate accounts easily to another instance in this case. If im on Lemmy.world and they mess up so I want to use Beehaw or something then (it looks like?) I have to make a new account essentially (I could be wrong on that im still figuring this out)
Currently this is correct. Account migration is a thing that is technically possible, they just have to implement it. However, I don’t think you would lose much anyway? Your username would be available on the other instances and yeah your posts are not under the exact account but you’re not exactly building a YouTube channel here.
Starting off, you should register on other instances too.
And compare the experiences on different instances.
Then you will understand why it doesn’t matter if lemmy.ml goes insane one day.
In short, Lemmy is free and open source software licensed under a copyleft license. It is “owned” by anyone who has contributed to the software, must remain open source - meaning the code must always be available - which means companies cannot profit off it.
Some corporate structure cannot take the code, change it, and hide it in order to create some for-profit Lemmy, as it is against the legal licensing. Any changes made to the code must be made public as well. Anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance.
Copyleft licenses like the GPL protect the users from capitalist profit motive as best as it can under capitalism. It can never be taken over, controlled, or made into an IPO to satisfy investors. It’s entirely controlled by its communities!
A cool thing with free software is that everybody can fork-it at any time, I am not sure who owns IP over the source code, but even if a proprietary fork happens, people will still be able to use/maintain the “free version”. It worked for GNU/Linux or for Mastodon so why not for lemmy ?
Moreover, it’s decentralized. One instance admin can decide to rely on ads or even sell some user data, and may-be it’s a valid way to fund an instance. However, user are free to choose another instance relying for example on donation.
It could happen if there was a very popular instance that didn’t federate with others.
An instance that gained its popularity starting off not federate with others? Not possible right? How the hell do you attract another instance’s users if you don’t federate?
An instance that start off federating but ended up breaking off? How is it supposed to retain its users from other instances?
Lemmygrad is blocked from federating with most other instances but still is a pretty large instance. Though that instance in particular is not very likely to look towards IPO.
Holy shit I am laughing so hard.
“Comrades! It’s been fun but we’ve decided we like money now, so we sold you all like serfs to a megacorporation. Now do as they say. Bye!”
It can’t be bought or sold because it doesn’t belong to anyone. That’s one of the benefits of it being open source.
And anyone can set up their own instance, so there’s no way to force a change at that end either. That’s one of the benefits of it being decentralized.
Any unwanted changes would just result in a fork, and instances would use that instead. The way it’s designed stops it being taken over by corporate interests.
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The difference is that reddit didn’t federate with hundreds of other websites. It was just “reddit” and they could steer it in whatever direction they wanted.
