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?
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?
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.
Reddit was also open source. You can still see the code from when they had it that way
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
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.