There is something horribly symbolic in all of that 🤮👿📚
It seems (a little) akin to burning books: sure maybe you can get away with doing whatever you wish to a printed copy that you purchase (legally speaking), but that doesn't mean that we (the bystanders) should rush to enjoy using the final product of the endeavor.
Don't they do this already? Except the manual labor part: they get us to build the fort. And do all the crime. And give them all the pets. Yes master? They do not care about money though, only raw pawer. 😁
One issue for me, and this is also true of Mastodon and by extension Mbin, is that I greatly prefer the voting and focus on a topic area rather than person. X / Twitter / Mastodon / Bluesky is where celebrities go to increase their profits, fame, and relevance, while Reddit / Lemmy / PieFed (/ + nodeBB + flarum + others) are where we discuss matters of import. I'm not criticizing your post here - this is definitely the correct community to discuss such matters:-) - just interjecting my personal preferences into the conversation, to disclose my own biases.
If Lemmy.World went away, then correct you would not "lose" the users as, well you said it, they would simply move to another instance.
But if Lemmy.World remained and you blocked it (if you had a method to do that - it's not easy at all using base Lemmy but it is doable with some older apps or like Ublock Origin filter rules and such), then in that context you would indeed "lose" all of that content. Or like if you got banned from that instance then that's another way that you could "lose" access to engage with communities located on it.
The more centralized something is, like Reddit, the more damaging it is to lose access to it, while the more decentralized, as you pointed out, the less overall effect that perturbations have upon the network.
The next issue then becomes cost. Which affects Lemmy as well: first there is the requisite effort to set up and self-host even a tiny instance (especially as it relates to potential spam and CSAM attacks), and second the network traffic costs. The latter may be tiny for a single user who only subscribes to a handful of communities, but someone trying to browse All and wanting everything to be available for their perusal (even if deleted soon-ish for storage reasons) will bear a much higher burden. Which depending on local costs may be trivially easy... or prohibitively expensive, but in either case the more data that someone wants to pull in the higher the cost.
And I imagine that Bluesky is either similar, or significantly worse.
Looking at your other comment on this thread, thank you - that kind of breakdown was precisely what I was hoping to see!:-)
So Bluesky is more decentralized than Reddit (or Facebook), but barely, and far less so than any Fediverse platform currently.
I think what OP was trying to convey was less the current state of affairs and more the underlying protocol itself, which they re-released now under a separate post.
There is no hope anymore... of avoiding consequences entirely, or perhaps in minimizing them. There IS hope that humanity may not go extinct. The trick as I see it may be to find the balance in between those extremes:-). (Unfortunately I don't know where precisely that is.)
Edit: people downvoting, please speak up why you believe this is wrong, and if possible send me a link to read in order to learn more? (I tried to include one in my comment but went down a rabbit hole and gave up, with lemm.ee going down I can't find what I was looking for.)
Why would they need to, are you anemic and lacking in blood? 🧛♂️