One thing that’ll need serious consideration:

I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.

If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.

(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).

Edit: sorry if you saw this comment two or three times, posting can still be a bit buggy…

Not exactly. Lemmy has separated the developer role from the admin role.

From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development. Two full time developers isn't going to be enough to get Lemmy to a position it can compete against Reddit or the next Reddit. Lemmy is rough around the edges and needs work; it needs to develop ways to incorporate code from others.

From an admin role, the various servers are going to need to solve major issues, including how to fund server costs. We are also seeing the fraying of the federation model as different admins have different goals for their part of Lemmy and these goals clash with each other.

There is going to be a ton of growing pains, and some of them are going to come from the fact that there isn't a CEO of Lemmy to choose which way to resolve problems.

CEO-Proof, but not Lazy-Instance-Owner-Proof. ahem beehaw ahem

It's called decentralized

You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting.

If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.

Does not have CEO, yet ...

But I can solve that. From now on I will take that burden.

Refer to me as super cool Lemmy CEO

First order of business, I command you lemmings to vibe.

Stay tunned for upcoming changes !!!

CEO-resistant.

Not CEO-proof until user and community migration by individual is possible

This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.

Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn't until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail -- donations are nice but are never enough.

As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.

Also MBA proof!

Every platform/service/product that is owned by a single company is eventually going to breakdown and turn into the worst form of itself. Companies are driven by this fiscal quarter being better than the last and it is inevitable that eventually quality has to go out the window to increase profits. The only sure-fire way to "reset" quality or force the company to ensure quality is to not monetarily support them. But with the internet, that is very difficult to achieve with having so few platforms that connect us all owned by companies. The only answer on keeping the internet a quality space for socialization and connecting with each other, is decentralization.

I'd say "sort of." Lemmy as a software is under a classic benevolent dictator situation. It's open source but as long as the lead devs remain two people we are kind of at their whim. Yeah someone could fork it but it's the same issue of you're now at the whim of that person keeping their fork up to date and what they want to do. Until they kind of allow more people having a say on the main repo it's up in the air what happens truly.

We've seen this same situation with Emby to Jellyfin. Where the open source project gets so good it goes close source, becomes a company and leaves everyone scrambling to get people to help work on the last bit of open source code. Meanwhile Emby just used their huge install base to upsell people. Jellyfin is still trying to get full parity with Emby despite Jellyfin having thousands of contributors and being open source. It's hard to keep up with well funded innovation compared to volunteer work.

So who actually owns the server this instance runs on? Doesn't it just mean they do whatever they want? So confused

And with the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy which created a significant base of decentralised online community, we just witnessed history where human beings achieved the next level of freedom of expression free from manipulation by a handful of powerful individuals

Unspezzable.

NoCEOShitification

When we think CEO we need to think “shareholders.” Including potential shareholders as in Reddit’s case. I think sometimes we are so focused on our feelings about a “big boss” that we forget the CEO is merely an avatar for the investor point of view in a business. They answer to the board of directors who represent or are even made up of shareholders, and they are usually paid in such a way to motivate shareholder benefits, like with stock instead of a high salary.

And when we think “shareholders” we need to think “loan money.” That’s how you get to be a shareholder. You plunk down some cash to float the business.

Therefore, to really be CEO-proof, an entity needs to be fiscally independent and never need an advance of cash to keep going. It must be entirely bootstrapped, paid-as-you-go, with no one standing to gain a whole bunch or lose a whole bunch by its failure or sale. That’s kind of a lot of needles to thread when you’re building something big. It can be done but we have to know what game we’re actually playing and not get distracted by “fuck The Man” sentiments. This is about cash.

One issue that I don't think Lemmy has tackled collectively is the licensing of the user data. Lemmy is open source and that's one crucial part of the enshittification resistance equation. The other is doing the equivalent for the user data. If the user data is licensed under the right version of the CC license, it will ensure that it can always be copied to another instance in cases of instance enshittification. As far as I know, there isn't anything about who owns the user data. That defaults to every author having copyright over their data. While this means the instance owner can't sell it without permission from every user it's also not conductive to moving bulk data across instances. Individual migration would improve this significantly but I believe we should switch to having user data licensed under some CC license too.