this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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It's a real risk. This is basically what happened with XMPP. Google became big enough to screw over the rest of the XMPP world.
Google took "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" right out of Microsoft's play book, and at this point it's just standard operating procedure for any major tech company.
Many people here and on Mastodon were afraid Meta was doing the same thing with Threads a few months back when there was talk of federation (I think they eventually backpedaled on that).
I think we're okay as long as the big players are open source, and no one instance has an overwhelmingly large share of the user base. I would recommend new Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin users to join an instance that is NOT the most popular (or even in the top 3), in order to maintain some balance in the ecosystem. lemmy.world and kbin.social are many times larger than the #2 biggest instances, and that's not ideal.
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
There's an important difference, though, especially with Lemmy. You used XMPP to communicate with particular people. When Google convinced, whatever, 70% of users to use Talk and then slammed the door shut, the smaller instances were no longer viable. People on those instances lost contact with their friends. They aren't going to just chat with whoever else happened to be left outside the walls.
But I don't look for specific people on Reddit, or on Lemmy. Any large-enough instance is fine. Just like people moved from Reddit to Lemmy, they can move from one instance to another. A major rift could drop the quality of the experience, at least for a while, but the instances would still be viable. They're not suddenly useless the way an isolated Jabber server was.
Google did not extend XMPP. They let it sit there for a decade, not changing anything. They still only supported SSL 2.0 when servers started to require TLS 1.2 for S2S connections. They didn’t implement any extensions, some vital to the ecosystem back then.