I'm an old reddit user, going back to '08. Like many of you I'm sure, I've seen the site rise and fall. Killing 3p apps was a major blow, along with the purge of so many subreddits, and now you have to log in to even view it...it's getting real bad.
I had heard of the fediverse back when Mastadon was first announced. Briefly checked it out, but didn't give it much mind. This morning I was browsing reddit and read a thread about the continual degradation of the site. Someone mentioned Lemmy (new to me), but I thought "hey! I'll check it out, why not''. A brief google search gave me some iOS apps, and I wound up using Voyager (10/10 btw, Voyager reminds me a lot of Apollo in it's hayday). I applied/logged in....and just...wow. Wow y'all. Lemmy reminds me so much of reddit circa late 00's. Sure, there is a smaller user base, but so was reddit at the time. I remember the subreddit you were supposed to go to when you made an acccount and introduce yourself :D
And here on Lemmy, nothing looks like obvious bot posts. Content seems real. In correlation with that, the post titles seem pretty reasonable and not based around rage bait / click bait.
After setting it up on my phone, I found the desktop site (I'm on a laptop some times) and I adore a.lemmy.zip. To me its the perfect layout. The other incredible thing about Lemmy is just how seamless it was to set up, on both mobile and desktop. It feels super accessible to non-technical users, which is something I don't think is true for a lot of fediverse things.
But seriously, I used to adore reddit so much. Watching it fall apart has made me sadder and sadder over time. There was seemingly nothing in its place. I really felt like that era of internet over entirely. Just my first few hours on Lemmy has made me realize I was wrong, in the best way possible. It gave me chills. I'm looking forward to this platform growing. So anyway, thanks for any/all of you who developed/are developing Lemmy. It really, truly feels like a return to the golden age of social.
Is there ever the possibility that ALLll instances get bought out , muzzled (as in you camt express certain opinions on all instances, even helpful ones) , and turned to advertiser-paid karma farms?
Edit: I just hit up r/laundry and apparently there are offshore karma farmers there that have been bought by the company 'actiive' to shill actiive brand products there! looool!
Not really, because it's relatively easy for a technical user to spin up their own instance. Unlike some other protocols, there's no centralized authority that says who can or can't spin up an instance. If you wanted, you could make an instance for just yourself. Or a group of people can set up a few instances that are completely separate from the rest of the network like a little island. You can never buy out ALL instances.
The best answer I have for your original question is that the people who built this technology have specifically designed it in order to prevent it from becoming an enshitified walled garden like old social media sites. There are many little things that have been done in order to make it difficult for the network to go bad. Many of the people participating in the network contribute their own safeguards because they believe in that mission.
For example, I'm a part of the team that runs lemmy.ca. We don't design the software, but we do own the servers and manage the donations people send to pay for the servers. We came together and set up a non-profit organization and registered it officially, so that there is a legal requirement for future team members to continue serving the best interests of our users. You can see the original announcement about that here: https://fedecan.ca/en/announcements/2024-04-08_incorporated
About your edit, we do get those posts here from time to time.
They get banned very quickly. We have no use for spambots that waste our server resources and make the community unpleasant.