This isn’t a business. All these instances are hosted by volunteers and nobody is accountable to any shareholders.

I’m sure there are more but here’s a few off the top of my head:

• The ability to defederate from any instance that tries. truthsocial.com and gab.com are based on Mastodon, and they’re cut off from the Fediverse because they’re “downhill” to put it lightly. If the instance you’re on starts acting funky you can just pack up and leave. If Facebook starts asking for your driver’s license where are you going to go? There is no other Facebook, and your friends wouldn’t be there if there was.

• The ability/culture for users to donate to their instance admins. Your instance admin should transparently list all their costs and donations, so everyone is aware how much is needed to cover infrastructure. Not counting volunteer hours, it’s very cheap to run these servers as long as the average person kicks in a buck every so often. The amount an average person needs to donate is probably like 5-10 cents a month, which can easily be covered by generous patrons. I personally donate about $10/month to my instance, which is way overkill and probably covers a significant chunk of their operating expenses (not that they need my money, I’m sure).

• No inherent need for people to use the software. No one is making money from higher site activity time, there’s no need to have black box algorithms that try to keep you engaged by promoting ragebait etc

• Decentralized nature makes it impossible to “buy it out”. Technically a company could probably coerce an existing Fedi server to sell so they can start causing chaos, but they can’t just drop $44 billion and nonconsensually steal the website from every user. Spread out among the servers and protections will only grow stronger.

It’s multiple websites. If admins of lemm.ee (for example) make some awful choices users will jump ship to another instance, still using the same app, and still subscribing to most of their communities.

This is the whole point of federation, having multiple instances, and being open source. It’s also why a bunch of the people on here are Linux heads.

Keep on mind that lemmy isn’t owned by a single corporation ir organization. It is a bunch of individually owned instances that talk to each other. This means that if you own an instance, you have contr of how it is moderated, but you have to balance that freedom with making your instance a place other instances will have to connect to. Its very democratic.

This goes all the way to the source code, which is open. So, even if the devs try to change it and exert more control, it could be forked.

Of course, you could still be a doomer and say something could come along and ruin it. But, it’s at least better than private, venture funded internet platforms on paper.

If you’re using “enshittification” the same way Cory Doctorow does, then the key is reducing the cost of moving to alternatives. Once a platform has a captive market then they can start taking advantage of consumers and advertisers.

It’s entirely possible that the Lemmy and Mastadon instances you join will become awful, but because anyone can host an instance and consume content from whichever instances they want the switching costs are essentially 0.

Support for ActivityPub is, in my opinion, an important component because it allows for a standardized way to consume content from social media networks. Imagine being able to leave Twitter, but you’re able to bring everyone you want to follow with you because their posts can be consumed using a standardized interface.

Two reasons:

1. Lemmy admins aren’t accountable to investors or shareholders so there’s no pressure to make things worse.
2. If enhsittification happens on any instance. Like it’s owned by a cooperation. Then other instances can block it/defederate, or users can move to another instance

lack of pressure from investors to make a return

Since when is Lemmy “a website”?