Lemmy is software anyone can develop and everyone controls, libre software, which makes it very hard for Lemmy to abuse us. To keep it this way, share the ideas of software freedom.
- Always check its software license: always check it is libre software (video guide here).
- Also avoid service as a software substitute.
- Libre software plus decentralisation [federation or peer-to-peer] is ideal.
- Remember, ‘open source’ misses the point.
If we focus on warning against individual apps, we must repeat our time and effort everytime new malware appears. So, target a common property: its software license.
With proprietary software, we are not the user, we are the used.
Although Lemmy is free and open source, the main power is the federation. The most valuable thing that Lemmy has, are its users and the content (this is the same for Reddit). And because of the federation every instance in the Lemmy network has these assets.
Let’s say one instance would get massive, and would stop federating and start charging for API access. If that happened, we would be in the same situation as now with Reddit. Yea, it would e a lot easier to set up your own instance, but you would still need to convince all these people to give up that main instance. So I’m really happy that federation basically would mean that all other instances could cut that massive instance out and still have all the data.
I like that idea.
What would happen to the communities on that instance, though? If they choose to block/defederate then the other instances would no longer be able to access them (or “have all the data”), right?
From what I understood from the Beehaw situation, other instances would have a snapshot of those post, but they would no longer receive any new reactions or votes, not even from other instances that they are still federated with (the host instance is the instance that should provide all other instances with new comments and votes). People would still be able to add comments, but those would not be shared with other instances.
I argue it wouldn’t be the same, but much better for the users.
You can already make an account on another instance. Ditch the old, use the new. Problem solved. The big advantage is, you don’t need to look for a new platform, accustom yourself with the new environment, and so on. Switching between instances is much easier than switching between platforms.
Yes, you might lose access to some communities, but that would happen anyways if you switch platform. And community redundancies exist (the good side of ‘fragmentation’).
Hopefully, we will get GitHub feature request #1985 fulfilled: Moving user profile to a new instance, which would further ease transitioning between instances. (Don’t get too excited, doesn’t seem it’s being worked on. Consider contributing if you can.)
This would make it harder to excert power in awful instances, people can easily vote with their feet.