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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Except lemmy specifically is AGPL and it's basically impossible to monetise as a startup because they can't close the source code.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/LICENSE
Kbin too:
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
They'd have to create their own from scratch.
Which is fine, ActivityPub is an open protcol. You don't even need to cleanroom, its all there. The AGPL is a shield against corporate interests, given how things are going that's a much needed feature.
There's also strong opinions if open source instances should federate with closed source instances, for reasons of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
That's not the end of the world, though it does mean that a competitor could always start using it. I was going to say just use Lemmy but a major site would probably want to have their own fork for stability so they're not at the whims of someone else.
They could probably use an open fork for a while while also developing their own software that would be compatible and then seamlessly switched out.