@rglullis Unless you are part of a hosting company trying to sell server space, which according to the homepage of communick.news maybe you are, we don't need a marketing hat on. What you are calling "success" has 0 impact on the actual mission of lemmy.
@rglullis Any project has a mission statement. or they should if they want their project to maintain for any lenghth of time. Lemmy is started by marxist-lennists, so I suspect their mission is related to trying to establisxh a marxist-lenninst society and anything that doesn't step towards achieving that goal probably isn't needed by the project. Establishing clear and understanable mission statements, and a way to update them if necessary, is a great way to tell when the right time to Fork a project is. There is certainly the niche way of doing it just because you can, like owning an AR-15, but that probably doesn't have great utility. I'm certainly not going to feed my family with an AK, and no one is going to use my poorly (read not at all) maintained fork of GNU Social.
I'm a Libertarian, so I have no objection to corporations controlling networks. At this point in history I don't see any reliable way for worker-cooperatives, private individuals, etc. to do so. But I've been a GNU evangelist my entire adult life. If Facebook ran on Free Software rather than closed source proprietary software, backed up by the force of governments, I'd be much more comfortable using it.
One of the great things about #Fediverse, or more accurately ActivityPub, like email before it (or more accurately POP, SMTP, etc.) is that there isn't a network to control. #FreedomsTheAnswer
@rglullis Please dont' call it the "Threadiverse" the biggest advantage of Lemmy/kbin/mbin is ActivityPub and the fediverse. Particularly the IDEAS behind the fediverse and Free Software more generally. The fact I'm reading this and commenting from Friendica is so much better than the old days. Just like reddit was a big step from a content perspective than a bunch of isolated forums, so the fediverse is the next step. Yes its been around for at least a decade (though some would say longer by clinging to XMPP/Jabber and even e-mail being part of the feidverse) but the fediverse is still in its infancy.