People downplay the “fringe” aspect, but it istheo most common complaint I hear, that Mastodon/Lemmy are the “crazy left wing” versions of Twitter/Reddit. And while I’m not necessarily right-wing myself, as someone who’s not far-left, in any sort of political or social discussion, yeah I kinda see it. Non “fringe” people don’t want to be on a platform where anything not “fringe” gets flamed/downvoted to oblivion, even if it’s not technically a rule that the communities are “fringe” it can feel like an unwritten rule. Then if anyone tries making a not de facto “fringe” instance everyone else defederates from it, effectively killing it before it can get off the ground. Let’s be real, there are plenty of valid reasons to defederate from Threads, but a common one I do hear is because most Threads users aren’t “fringe” enough. That’s not going to attract a lot of people to Mastodon or Lemmy itself.

Generally I agree. Many of the largest and most popular distros are run by corporate entities: Canonical (Ubuntu and its various flavors), Red Hat (RHEL, Fedora), SUSE (SLE, OpenSUSE), and so on. Many more of the popular distros are community developed but are based on, or draw heavily from, corporate distros. Most of the more “beginner friendly” distros just so happen to be these corporate distros or ones based on them. It would be foolish to think Linux would be where it’s at today without the contributions of these companies and others such as Valve, who has almost singlehandedly made Linux gaming commercially viable. It’s still up to the community, however, to keep these companies honest when it comes to staying true to FOSS principles and compliance with the FOSS licenses they work under. That includes things like telemetry and a respect for privacy and security, allowing for freedom as to when an end user wishes to update their software, and retaining the open source nature of code and companies’ contributions to it. Corporations have the freedom to use and contribute to open source software, and they even have the freedom to make profit from it. But they have no more or less freedom than anyone else has to do so as well, and that’s where we have to keep an eye on them.

Redundancy (multiple instances making communities on the same subject) is a thing that’ll happen. I’m already subbed to communities on several instances dedicated to the same subjects. That can have an advantage, though, in that communities on the same subject but different instances can provide different perspectives on the subject depending on the makeup of the community in each instance (membership, modding, etc). Don’t like the community in one instance? Unsub from that one and hop on over to another one. Having one account able to access multiple instances allows for that. It can also help if one community or instance goes down for whatever reason, there may be another community/instance open where you can keep interacting. So I don’t see the redundancy thing as necessarily a problem.