It’s not zero, each fiefdom has very little power to keep users. As it is right now, a user unhappy with their instance culture or laws can move to another instance. Comparing it to moving in real life, in real life you have a lifetime worth of things that tie you to your fiefdom. Comparing it to well established and centralised social media, then those fiefdoms still have a lot of power over you.
Your social network can’t come with you, they’re SSO providers, they’re tracking and human-verification providers, they have high quality exclusive content, they’re sometimes the only channel for interacting with some third parties you have to interact with (Government, utility company, etc).
Instances are worthless, what has value are the /c/ and absolutely nothing in the Lemmy model protects communities from the admin of the instance where it was created to go full Elon. I bet that at some point it will happen.
Most of the time you don’t even know who is running the instance. Suffice that one of them that’s running a large enough communities needs a bit of cash and decide to sell it. Or they could be in bed/owned by any intelligence agency/corporation/political party. Who knows.
I’ve spend a year in my lost time musing on the design of a truly decentralised model where identity, community, curation (moderation) and distribution are entirely decorrelated to address those specific issue among all the othes, including the one you mentioned. It’s complex, it’s a big task, but I don’t think it’s impossible. I’m too lazy to code it though :D
Lemmy is still shit governance wise. It’s just a bunch of fiefdom managed by god knows who, there’s absolutely nothing democratic about it.
It’s not zero, each fiefdom has very little power to keep users. As it is right now, a user unhappy with their instance culture or laws can move to another instance. Comparing it to moving in real life, in real life you have a lifetime worth of things that tie you to your fiefdom. Comparing it to well established and centralised social media, then those fiefdoms still have a lot of power over you.
Your social network can’t come with you, they’re SSO providers, they’re tracking and human-verification providers, they have high quality exclusive content, they’re sometimes the only channel for interacting with some third parties you have to interact with (Government, utility company, etc).
no one corporation can censor it or turn it into an altright cesspool.
every individual or company can have a federated instance if they please. lemmy is more akin to the old forums, which are a massive step forward.
not perfect; much better.
although i think my op was responding to another comment and i did a wrong.
Instances are worthless, what has value are the /c/ and absolutely nothing in the Lemmy model protects communities from the admin of the instance where it was created to go full Elon. I bet that at some point it will happen.
Most of the time you don’t even know who is running the instance. Suffice that one of them that’s running a large enough communities needs a bit of cash and decide to sell it. Or they could be in bed/owned by any intelligence agency/corporation/political party. Who knows.
I’ve spend a year in my lost time musing on the design of a truly decentralised model where identity, community, curation (moderation) and distribution are entirely decorrelated to address those specific issue among all the othes, including the one you mentioned. It’s complex, it’s a big task, but I don’t think it’s impossible. I’m too lazy to code it though :D