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.
It could happen if there was a very popular instance that didn’t federate with others.
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!
