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?
The biggest problem Lemmy has is funding, and that’s going to be a continual problem.
But it’s like this. Corporations can enter the space and offer their content/servers/communities for free, and people can use those servers. If people want to be on corpo servers, they can choose it, if they don’t they won’t be on one.
If corporations start charging for server, then the other Lemmy servers just don’t pay and restrict access to those servers, people will choose if they want to pay for Lemmy (and go to Lemmy servers who pay, or the corpo servers) or more likely accept it and stop.
But like I said the problem is funding, there needs to be continual funding to run the servers they have, but I believe the goal will be to keep the servers from being bloated pieces of shit like Reddit, and hopefully that means they will be cheaper and maybe can be done through donations.
As for “Can’t they buy out.” Let’s say I’m bad guy business, and I’ll simply offer to hire you or buy your business, you never actually have to work for me, or sell me your business. The only reason something like Activision will sell their business is because Activision because Activision wants to, or really a majority of share holders want to.
Lemmy.world is owned by something or someone. If they don’t want to sell to a corporation they can just choose not to. The problem is Reddit is owned by shareholders, and enough shareholders that they can be taken over.
If someone has 51 percent of reddit (Conde Nast) and someone offers A LOT of money for Reddit, they can still say no… though Conde Nast as a corporation itself has share holders themselves so if they did something stupid (Ignoring an offer for like 2-10x the valuation) those share holders are going to question it… That doesn’t mean Conde Nast HAS to even take a 10x valuation (if they think the site is worth 20x, they obviously wouldn’t) but that’s why Reddit is able to be bought since they have to answer to the share holders and Lemmy theoretically could stay non corporate.
The thing is: the average person with admin skills can probably house 100+ users at almost no cost, or comfortably out of pocket
maybe a few donations soo thats what decentralisation hopes to achive
One of the major instances (lemmy.ml? Maybe lemmy.world? I can’t find the post right now) recently posted that they completed a massive spec upgrade for their instance. It was remarkably reasonable, and could very easily be covered by donations. Something like 4 vCPUs and 32GB RAM. Or, failing that, (and I know a lot of people will balk at this), a single non-datamined ad at the top of the page.
