Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
I don’t think #2 is a strong argument. Reddit, when started, had very different ideals from what it does now. The founders did too, or at least the dead guy did, idk if spez was always what he is now.
If I started a Lemmy or Mastodon instance and it got REAL big, and after 5, maybe 10 years of maintaining it, it’s sustainable, but probably not really making me money and I’m tired of running it… And Meta comes around and says “Hey we’ll buy it for 10 million dollars so we can federate it with our own activitypub based social media”, I’d probably say yes. Wouldn’t you? And while everyone COULD switch, not everyone will. Not everyone switched from reddit either.
So I’d say it’s theoretically possible to corporatize vast parts of the fediverse, but of course there will always be room for people to start new instanced that don’t federate with the corporate ones.