The account migration feature is sorely needed to help mitigate the chance of one instance monopolizing a majority of Lemmy users.

I could see the rise of premium servers that charge a subscription to offer value added services or verification or some kind of elite domain status. Imagine being on taylorSwift.social for $1000/year.

The real risk isn't really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/"questions" about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/"hey i just found this thing!" posts and so on.

Those aren't as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they're still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that's less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?

Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it's not really the risk that's likely to happen in the short term as much as "social media marketers" shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.

Unfortunately money makes the world go round. Part of the meaning of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” means that no matter who you are, no matter what kind of service you employ, no matter what you try and do for yourself, somewhere along the line capitalism comes in and causes someone to suffer. It’s pervasive and insidious.

If instances are completely supported by user donations, that’s great. But they will never match the billions of dollars that corps can toss around.

The only real way to prevent corporate influence on anything is to abolish corporations and/or capitalism. In the meantime, though, we as users can take steps to mitigate their influence: discuss proactively, agree to defederate at a moment’s notice, and server admins can refuse bribes/offers/etc.