I didn't have the energy to write all that and what I woud have written would have been 90% the same so thank you! The parent doesn't know how things actually are in corporations. Neither about hosting stability, nor data security, nor regulation, nor financial security, nor responsibility. Most of the concerns they had with the random dude are valid for any typical, in other words limited liability, corporation. And the big instances are not at all hosted by some random dude. You can't run a big instance without sysadmin knowledge at the very least. The three I have looked into, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, are all run by either software developers or system/database admins. At least two of them are also well funded which we can tell due to the transparent funding and available track record. Small non-profit teams and organizations have made much bigger contributions to my life and society than many big corporations. From Wikipedia, through Mozilla to all the outfits behind most open source software that literally runs the world. Two random dudes write the crypto for the security that nearly every corporation uses (OpenSSL). Anyways. I'm not writing this to change minds. Just expressing my thoughts and reaction. 🥲