Why are people saying that Lemmy is free of corporate interest?

justdoit@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 200 points –

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?

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Sure they can. But...

  1. How can they compete in a space where people are already there providing a service without trying to extract value from them?
  2. Why would one of these larger instances sell out when their userbase can sustain them and selling out is antithetical to the reason they started the instance in the first place?
  3. I and many people like me would be fine in our own instances. We'd just defederate. If, say, lemmy.world sold out those guys would just have to switch instances. It's a pain, yes, but it's possible.
  1. By providing better services and features. Corporations are capable of providing good pro user services when they're forced to through competition, but what they'll do is do that until they build a big enough user base then splinter off and start pulling the same shit again. It's the whole thing behind embrace-extend-extinguish.
  2. Money. Lots of money. If money doesn't work they'll try to compete on point 1.
  3. Agree. Most people will be too lazy and unprincipled to care, but I'm fine with a smaller higher quality community and Lemmy makes that possible. If corporations get a foothold on the platform it'll still be impossible for them to get a 100% monopoly like they can on their own proprietary centralized platforms.

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.

Everybody has a price.... Sell out is just a matter to get to that price

Yes perhaps it's a bit optimistic to think Ruud or sunaurus wouldn't sell out for, say, a billion dollars. But I think that it'd also be unrealistic to think Meta would actually offer a substantial amount of money measured even in the millions of dollars for any single Lemmy instance.