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

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 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…

There will never be a time when you need adds to pay for a server even if you had a server with 50 million people the cost to run that server might be like 100k if just 1 million people pay 1 dollar you already have 1 million dollars a month you only need adds when your a company that needs to grow every quarter

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.

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

One day the lemmy could just go closed source and sell to a company.

I agree that the more accurate term is "board-proof" but I still think "CEO-proof" conveys the idea better to someone who is unaware of the way social media corpos work. The image of the shady CEO with his pinstripe suite and greased hair, lighting his big cigar with a wad of dollar bills is so strong in the cultural conciousness, that even my inlaws would switch to a federated plattform.

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.

It's called decentralized

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-resistant.

I don’t think it’s necessary “CEO proof” but it is definitely a bit better positioned to avoid the pitfalls that Twitter and Reddit have experienced. Hence the reason I am here. But there’s nothing stopping a for-profit corporation from buying out the owner of a large instance (or multiple large instances). I think the best way to try and prevent that is for people to join hyper-local, hyper-specific instances that can all connect with one another. I assume that would be the benefit of Lemmy.