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?
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?
OK, but what if Meta’s instance, due to their vast marketing power, becomes an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the fediverse (I don’t think that’s an unreasonable fear); some instances start federating with it justifying that it brings you both worlds, it becomes an increasingly hard-sell to join those instances not federating with it and they became very niche or die out. Consider how Android started out as a nice neutral FOSS project and, while still technically FOSS, once Google became dominant it became Google spyware.
Many open source projects have died that way, embrace, extend, extinguish. True it’s hard to say for sure that Lemmy and the Fediverse will never fall victim to that. However there’s lots of open source projects that have endured without corporate corruption.
To be fair, AOSP is open-source and free of Google’s services, but said services deliver ecosystem integration - and now even core functionality, as they’re deprecating the stock dialer app.
You say “to be fair” but with full respect I don’t think there’s a fairer way to put it than how I described it as “technically FOSS”. The source is free but does it work to provide freedom to users?