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As I understand it, the fediverse as a whole is composed of instances, each one communicating with whichever other instances it wishes (the instances acting as social medias of sorts). Each instance is created by people making their own thing, so if one large instance (such as Lemmy.world) were to get taken over by filthy capitalists, someone could simply make a new, separate instance and choose not to federate with Lemmy world. Is this not the case?
Websites get traded on the backend regularly without hemorrhaging their userbases. A large site is going to have a degree of inertia. People aren't going to all simultaneously pick up out of .world and go to .world2 because someone on le.mee or .shi.tjustworks talks shit about the mods. There's too much of a trust deficit, just for starters. And it would be a two-way street if it wasn't (people in .world claiming le.mee was the one that got taken over and you should decamp from them to our instance).
Past that, you can always make a new website even before federation. The trick is then getting a working community to include you in their network of links and shares. Federation makes that process more explicit and more pronounced. But most local instances have learned not to federate with everyone in the fediverse (because there's so much gnarly shit out there), which means doing promotion and negotiation to get your new instance recognized by the survivors.
In a single case of a single instance getting taken over, migration is possible if a bit painful. But if it happens repeatedly, thanks to a professional business team going after instances strategically while individual largely-ignorant users have to respond organically, then the Fediverse doesn't have a chance over the long term. Eventually, the business interest gets control of enough high profile domains and pollutes the means of interpersonal communication to such a high degree that you either trust your instance or you abandon the Fediverse entirely.
It becomes a game of "Who Is The Werewolf?", which strategically favors the werewolves.
Did you follow the 196 controversy at all? An entire community just upped sticks and left because they got shitty with the mods.
I can see an entire instance being largely abandoned in a matter of days if they got offside with their users badly enough. Add in the loss in traffic from being defederated by everyone, and it would be a big loss for whoever bought the instance.
That wasn't a one-and-done. The community had been bleeding for years, thanks to the increasingly reactionary vibe on the site. Mods built a life-raft (not unlike CTH or The_Donald after the purges in 2020) and decamped eventually. But it wasn't spur of the moment, and it certainly wasn't with the original user base intact.
I see entire instances shut down overnight. But, again, this tends to be after the admins have purged the mod crews and the community at-large has either splintered or evacuated. Users tend to be sticky within their communities, even after a great deal of disruption.
I was thinking more of the community leaving 196@blahaj, and moving to onehundredninetysix@blahaj, that was a much more organic reaction.
It's also propaganda. The more the recipients, the more valuable it becomes to dump huge amounts of money into controlling the narrative with propaganda posts, for which you don't need admin control over the servers.