this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Same. I just hope my friend group and by some extension the gaming community chooses something that won't fall into the same pitfal of closed source for profit organizations.
I hope the transition is towards matrix, or something like it.
Hopefully, I would love a discord alternative that does the same thing but is open sourced similar to the fediverse.
What exists that cannot be sold to a high enough bidder? Even Lemmy isn't magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?
The internet is fundamentally a privatized system that exists to generate profit for investors. There is no true public domain. Its all just turf up for sale, some of which hasn't gone to a notable bidder yet. If you do manage to improve a patch of digital real estate to the point where someone will pay you enormous sums to divest, you'd be a fool not to take the money.
Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.
Because it's federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.
Because of the networking effect, people don't leave. People have stubbornly clung to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube in the face of enshittification.
This notion that everyone's just going to pick up and leave Lemmy hasn't even worked on Reddit, the OG thing everyone was supposed to pick up and leave after it went to shit.
Federation is strong specifically because of how it gets around the networking effect. You don't need a .world account to see content from it. That doesn't apply for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube without shenanigans.
You don't need to leave lemmy. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new account somewhere else, with zero downsides.
If you control the main server, breaking federation is not a problem.
Federation doesn't get around the networking effect. It inhibits the network's growth by allowing the community to fracture along instances, depending on the whims of the admins. But when one community outstrips the rest, its meaningless.
Federating mitigates the flaws of OG Mastadon, as it allows individual users to stack threads from multiple participating instances. But as soon as their native instance goes to shit, they've got to pick up a new account somewhere else and rebuild their profiles. And people - by and large - don't like doing that repeatedly.
"It takes 10 minutes to set up an account in App X" is the same line I've heard explaining why people would leave Twitter or Facebook or Reddit.
Why doesn't BlueSky have all of Twitter's business if it's so easy?
If I care about my account, it would suck. Can't migrate unless server allows me to
Not immune, but let's say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn't lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn't lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody's going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.