The time is ripe for philanthropists and academia to rise to the occasion and help shape a social network for the people, by the people.
Lemmy appears to be the closest thing to a publicly-operated reddit alternative. With tens of thousands of redditors looking for something better, I am somewhat surprised that more instances aren’t rolling out from well-financed FOSS agencies, technologists and others.
It would be great to see some of the 3PA developers committing to this platform in response to Reddit’s increasing enshittification.
There is an opportunity to capture the momentum that is underway, to begin taking back what we’ve lost to corporate interests these past twenty years, and to tear down the walled gardens.
Has that happened with Mastodon?
Orgs spending volunteer money have to be careful, they have to allocate money to their stated causes or they could get in trouble. A Lemmy instance would have to coincide with their agenda.
A philanthropist can do what they want, but they could still attract criticism for not donating to world hunger or some more optics-friendly cause. They’d also probably end up with a fairly popular instance which would require effort spent on maintenance and moderation.
I think people who actually want to run instances will end up running them. I’m considering starting one. Some of those will end up running really good, stable and desirable instances which can then attract donations for the cause.