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?
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.
a functional “move account” function would go a long way to maintain a reasonable power dynamic between instances and users . I know its on the project roadmap, but its something that could (and should) be explored by all the new eyes looking at the Lemmy codebase.
Do you happen to have a link for the project roadmap? The concept of moving the account sounds amazing, and I hope that dessalines and nutomic manage to do it. (Easier said than done, I bet that both are overburdened.)
I hope that there’s also something in the roadmap about moving/cloning a community, to migrate it elsewhere.
That’s the way I see it as well. Like a Hydra, you can cut one of its head, but another instance will take its place.
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)
^You, taking corporate money as they try to take over Lemmy.
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.
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!”
If an instance become overwhelmingly popular it could theoretically decide that users from other instances aren’t important and leave the federation. They would lose the users from elsewhere, but leave them free to fork the code and do their own thing. I’m not sure how this works with the licensing, but they were determined I’m sure they could go down the same path as Reddit.
Lemmy is FOSS and there are lots of servers. if you dissatisfied with one of them you just move to other servers or maybe fork the code. So, the chances are slim
i was going to say this
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.
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!
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AFAIK lemmy is not a for profit entity and simply not interested in overcharging.
Open source software rather focuses on being a good product rather than making as much money as possible.
The barrier to migrating away from an instance that’s going to shit is far lower than on reddit. Also any one instance in the Fediverse holds vastly less power. An individual instance isn’t lucrative enough to buy out. And the tech itself isn’t lucrative enough to buy out. Even if you managed to create a non-FOSS branch the FOSS branch would remain and you would now not only be competing with the libre Fediverse but also all the monolithic social media platforms.
