this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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A distributed service is much less vulnerable to being bought up by a single narcissistic billionaire who can ruin the online experience of millions of people at once.
A distributed service like Lemmy is spread out over 600 Instances in countries all over the world. If someone buys the most popular Lemmy Instance and wrecks it, those users can simply move to the same communities on the second or third or fourth most popular Instance and the original Instance will wither and die. This also works for communities with power tripping moderators. You can quickly find out through a search which community is the "real" one by the number of subscribers it has.
But again, what tangible benefit does that have for the average user? They don't give a fuck about billionaire ownership, moderation, or where an "instance" or server is located.
You have more control over your front-page content. If you don't want to get a particular feed, you unsubscribe from it.
Well, you should care about it because that's how online communities get ruined. Case in point: Twitter has become a propaganda tool for an apartheid-loving fascist since he bought it.
Why should a user care about the health of an online community? To them it should "just work".
(I'm being purposely facetious here, because the average person really doesn't care about this shit. When Twitter no longer serves its purpose to them they just leave and go to the next place)