More like chiroquacktors! Haha, you get it? Because…

Yeah, and it sucks. Eff the neoliberals. All my homies hate neoliberals.

So THAT’S where they were going

The thing is, the concern people have with lemmy.world is the same concern we used to have with lemmy.ml. The question of how big an instance ought to be is still unanswered. Maybe lemmy.world is below that level and people will naturally shy away from it once it gets there. On top of that, limited resources on the side of instance owners will drive decentralization. For example, Lemmy.ml shut its doors to new users once it became overloaded. Similar things could happen in the future.

Even if a major instance did go down, we’d just lose the content. The people, for the most part, would migrate to whatever new instances sprung up to replace it.

There was one Voat. When the one Voat goes bust, Voat goes bust. Like any enterprise, it’s failure can be attributed, at least in part, to poor management.

There are many Lemmy’s. If one Lemmy collapses, another Lemmy can take its place. The individual instances might be less stable than a centralized social media site, like Voat was, but when federated the whole unit is more resilient than centralized social media.

Sell

The tech bubble is over (kinda, they’re trying to spin it back up with AI) and so is the free money party. Rates are rising, and investors aren’t content to throw money at companies that still don’t know how they’re going to make any money. To make money, they’ve got to squeeze it out of somebody: either users or advertisers.

In Twitter’s case, they squeezed it out of a vain billionaire who they convinced to buy the company. The shareholders got their money, and now making a profit is somebody else’s problem. Reddit could’ve similarly tried to court a buyer, but there’s no guarantee they would have found one (maybe Meta?). Instead they’re trying to a gin up some revenue either out of third party apps or by pushing third party app users onto the main app so they can advertise to them. I haven’t been following Discord and Meta’s stuff, but the reasoning is probably similar.