this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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It can be bought by a billionaire. I think we need to be careful thinking this risk doesn’t exist.
“We can just make another instance” - this won’t happen like people think it will. If all the content is on Lemmy.world and it gets bought, then people are going to be hesitant to move somewhere else, just like people are hesitant to leave Reddit now.
A instance or two can be bought yes, but many if the popular subs are distributed all over.
And if enshitification hits the biggest instances it will bleed users because it's so easy to switch instances
It is however much easier to move between fediverse instances than it is to move from commercial social media to the fediverse. Once you're on the fediverse, moving is easier.
Also the communities are run by people who actually give a shit about FOSS and decentralization
Another reason to spread the content across instances
Decentralization is key
Even if people running instances are saints, a lot of money can not only buy, but bully them into submission. Bullshit lawsuits is one way to do so before they are financially crippled. We are safeguarded only by our irrelevance.
“We are safeguarded only by our irrelevance” it’s not just Lemmy. I’m thinking about the trans movement that progressed quietly without fanfare and the moment it was no longer “irrelevant “ for the majority it started getting massive pushback. Shocking how little it took to go from irrelevant to a danger to society.
same is for Linux.
everybody keeps advocating for linux; but i'm not a big fan of it. I'm worried that it will bring a ton of bullshit to the linux platform, and i don't like that.
Instances can be bought by billionaires. The software can't. And I don't think many billionaires would buy a website running a software that they cant control tbh
The software can, but the price is likely too high. In the end money can pressure anyone to do virtually anything. Having 100 lifetimes of productive work pressuring you to do something cannot just be ignored.
The software is open source. Everyone owns it, and you can't buy something that's owned by everyone
Why won't it? I think user accounts need federation as well, but switching hosts isn't hard. Lemmy.ca went down a little while ago due to a power supply breaking. The admin has been great about it, moving away from the provider that took a day to fix the issue. But during the downtime I was able to use an account I has already set up on a different instance.
When reddit is down, it was really down. When a lemmy instance is down you can just use another. Don't get tied into just one host.
It’s easy to say “don’t get tied down”, but people do. People like their online personas, their handles, their comment and post history. It’s a mixture of sunk-cost fallacy and FOMO. Reddit knows this, it’s why they still have 2000x as many monthly users as Lemmy.
This will be the same here: if a billionaire buys the biggest instance, yeah cool everyone can defederate, but then all the historical content is gone, most of the users are gone unless they move to you or an instance still federated to you, and you essentially alienate yourself.
That's why mastodon pushed for account migration features. They made a bunch of them.
There is also bluesky that made their own protocol to handle identities diffretly than ActivityPub.
There is just not enough devs to code that stuff in Lemmy.
Mastodon still doesn't allow account import
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export
It's not that easy to implement. Any feature that lets you import posts would just be a bypass for any kind of spam protection or rate limit. You could just "import" thousands of spam posts at a time, without the server being able to prevent it, because it seems totally legitimate.
should def strive for it for lemmy aswell.
can’t find much info on the subject on github for it unfortunate
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/account-migration/3058
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
I have blocked content from lemmy.world altogether and have so much fun. Go try it, leave the bubble.
I'm on lemmy.world through Boost, but have lots of communities from fediverse and other Lemmy's and whatnot (still learning how it all works).
What is wrong with lemmy.world and what do you recommend?
Be careful with letting someone else guide you in this way. Everyone has individual tastes.
I'm on dbzer0, which is an instance for pirates and anarchists. But I found it by having an account on a random instance and browsing lemmy for a long time before choosing to move here.
Just don't get too attached to where your account is, feel out the fediverse, and then you can decide.
I'll try to keep that in my mind. So far it feels like the "local" and "all" selections in Boost, which I guess come from world, are not very varied. Reddits' r/all is just everything, which is great. It gives you a very varied, unfiltered (seemingly) feed
Local will just show content from the instance you're logged into. In your case it's lemmy.world. All means content from world and instances federated with world. All is everything, but all of lemmy is still tiny compared to reddit so it just doesn't move that fast. I usually sort by active and that keeps things fresh. "Active last x hours" also works nicely.
I think that's what I need to remember, Reddit is absolutely humongous compared to Lemmy.
Honestly the only thing wrong with world is it blocks db0's piracy community. Beyond that it's pretty inoffensive to the general fediverse.
Also blocks Tor and tried to push a Zionist "fact check" bot
Similar rules to Reddit. You can get busted for saying “eat the rich” because it’s supposedly a call for violence.