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?

  • T JediA
    2·
    1 year ago

    No. Lemmy (and any other FediVerse service) can be targeted for take over from any corporation. But there’s a few things that prevents from thinks like… Idk, Facebook buying Instagram or Musk buying Twitter:

    1. The source code of Lemmy is open. Anyone can just take the code and create another “Lemmy alternative” in case of a buy out.
    2. The underlying protocol (Activity Pub) is open too, and managed by W3C (which manages other things like the HTTP protocol). So I think would be very hard for it to highjack to only work for one company.
    3. You are right, a company can create or buy an instance or another similar service (and probably will, see Threads from Instagram). But they cannot interfere with the other ones. If the instance you’re in was bought and you don’t like the new owners, you can just create another account in another instance and keep following the same communities and content (because of the protocol I mentioned) and having the same experience. Unlike what happened to closed services like reddit that you cannot follow subreddits from here.

    Tl;Dr: we are not free of corporate interest, but we have tools to prevent a corporate dominance.