I hate to admit it, but it's beginning to look like resistance really is futile. Too many people just don't care about EEE, and communities are too fragile to prevent the embrace, like the whole c/android incident from yesterday.
It seems like this is just going to be something that happens every once in a while. A rich douchebag comes in and absorbs a large chunk of the fediverse then cuts away and takes a bunch of shitposters with him. Then the core lemmy community has to rebuild the fediverse from scratch, and some other douchebag lines up to do the same thing.
I guess on the bright side, maybe the core group of lemmy users will harden their fediverse each time a rich douchebag EEEs it. Like the core fediverse learns something new with each EEE. Then maybe after like a decade and 3 or 4 rich douchebags EEEing the place, then the fediverse will have fully hardened to some form that makes it impervious to rich douchebags.
!android@lemmy.world was the 15th largest community in the fediverse with 19k subscribers, and then the mods conspired with the r/android mods to lock that community and move it to !android@lemdro.id. All of this was done with no input from the users subscribed there.
That of course led to a flame thread yesterday, and a whole bunch of debate about whether !android@lemmy.world should be reopened or not. It appears to be locked still, so not sure how that debate ended.
But I said it shows how fragile communities are because that was about as blatantly obvious of a community snatch as there possibly could be. Like 10 mods got in a room and said "let's just move this huge community to a new instance" and it worked. There's no way we're going to stop Meta if we can't even stop that.
I hope you are right. till now the fediverse has a "natural" line of defense. You have to think about how it works, Just nothing for regular everyday normal... fools.
Time will tell how the opening of Threads for the fediverse will affect us. In the beginning I was hopeful that the opening would bring some traction to the fediverse but as more I learn and read the less I can support it.
Just a little more data, friend. I just need a nibble. A lil taste. I just need a little bit more and I'll never need it again. Please friend just a speckle of data?