Even if they bought up a few instances, they would never have the ability to buy them all. Even if they did, you could just create more that are outside corporate control.

The Internet used to be federated like this, where you would connect to servers that hosted various services such as chat (IRC), instant messaging (XMPP), streaming (IceCast), file sharing (FTP), etc. It wasn't until the 2010s that corporations started to centralize popular protocols into their own proprietary standards.

All we can do is let corporations run themselves into the ground over and over until people get sick of it and use stable, federated services.

It's worth keeping in mind that the World Wide Web, which people often incorrectly refer to as "the Internet", is the biggest federated service in existence. Companies like AOL tried and failed to make their own walled garden version of The Web.

The goal of the fediverse is to do what The Web did, but for every service online. This is something that could take decades, but it is something we need to do to make sure the future Internet is resilent against corporations and governments.

What I would honestly fear happening more than corpos coming in to buy up communities is the possibility of them join forces to lobby congress or other governmental authorities into creating unfavorable legislation and regulation.

It is nice to be in a free world, but freedom is a threat to those that want to make money off of peoples' attention.

If Meta or Google tries to buy your instance, you can migrate to another one. They can't buy them all up.

There's nothing to stop Facebook or Google or whoever from spinning up a large Lemmy instance, piling it up with ads and shilling it to their users. As long as it's federated the rest of us could still use non-bloated instances to read/interact with content.

The real risk is companies showing up and injecting bots everywhere. It wouldn't take much for some company to register bot accounts to any open instance out there and spam ads on local and remote communities, making moderating in general more difficult.

Step 1: Block their instances.

Step 2: Meme, troll and shitpost the hell out of 'em.

Step 3: We improvise once we get there.

We can just block them as users or as instances if the admins want. Point is they are not in charge. The network is by the people for the people. They can engage on equal terms. Lemmy and fediverse will only get better. Who the hell wants trackers, privacy violations and ads as part of the experience. And unlike reddit you can't just buy ad placement.

One of the very few lessons we should probably take from tumblrs playbook but making the platform so actively hostile to corporations by dunking on them and memeing them so hard that the mere mention of lemmy sends shivers down their CEOs spines. The advertising value of tumblr post buyout literally dropped to around 1% of its worth due to the active hostility within the community to any corporate interactions.

Also what ground would they have on a lawsuit? It's federation based, if they sue one instance to it shutting down another can just pop up.

I imagine if Lemmy/the fediverse get big enough, corps will make accounts. It's a small step from there to making their own instances, then modifying those instances so that they can see out, but you have to be registered locally to see in. I'm not sure how difficult that would be to implement.

When they realize they can put all the promo bots they want up for pennies and have an experience they control while broadcasting to the masses its going to be fun!

I expected there will be blocks but there will also be arrangements where marketers pay for placement on a instances pages.

The tools are rudimentary now but they will evolve.