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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Reddit administration thinks the site is too big to fail. Lemmy isn't a real competitor to them because the decentralization of federation means that joining an instance and trying to navigate the fediverse is a bit too complex for most people. The reason why massively populated social media sites took off is because people like having everything in one place where everyone else is.
What I could see happening is a well-funded startup creates a fork of Lemmy that they use as the basis for their instance and they can customize and develop as they see fit. This instance would be accessible to everyone already on Lemmy, but they could offer one centralized alternative to Reddit where new users don't have to think about what they need to do to join.
I'm sure that if Lemmy picks up critical mass, it could lower the bar for most people to be willing to jump through the extra hoops. Ultimately federation solves the chicken and egg problem that any social media startup has.
Except lemmy specifically is AGPL and it's basically impossible to monetise as a startup because they can't close the source code.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/LICENSE
Kbin too:
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
They'd have to create their own from scratch.
Which is fine, ActivityPub is an open protcol. You don't even need to cleanroom, its all there. The AGPL is a shield against corporate interests, given how things are going that's a much needed feature.
There's also strong opinions if open source instances should federate with closed source instances, for reasons of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
That's not the end of the world, though it does mean that a competitor could always start using it. I was going to say just use Lemmy but a major site would probably want to have their own fork for stability so they're not at the whims of someone else.
They could probably use an open fork for a while while also developing their own software that would be compatible and then seamlessly switched out.
Joining instances in Lemmy is very simple if you're using an app like Boost and finding other instances as well. On PC it's another matter.