Reddit was never FOSS.

Reddit went full open-source in 2008 with a Github repo, did a (possibly deliberately) poor job of maintaining the repo despite this source code resulting in a plethora of 3rd party site enhancements and feature suites, then ultimately close its code nine years later.

Linux is still going stong, even with vested financial interests.

RedHat did Linux extremely dirty, and they're hardly the first. It also has a significantly larger, more skilled, and more international userbase.

Most importantly, wie have already made the decision to leave traditional social media and build something better.

That's a beautiful lie. Lemmy's federation has been its pioneering feature, but it continues to backslide into Reddit-with-Extra-Steps. If anyone could claim they were building something truly novel, it was Mastadon. But that complexity and novelty has been an albatross around their necks since day one.

If worst comes to wiorst, we’ll find each other again.

:-/

Big corporations cannot take control of our spaces.

There is no particular reason why a committed group of business professionals couldn't work their way onto the largely volunteer Lemmy team and hijack the project, buy out major site administrators, or point the Feds in their direction like they did with Aaron Swartz or Ross Ulbricht.

There's nothing magical about the Fediverse. Its still the product of human labor and hardware, just like every other online space.

if one large instance (such as Lemmy.world) were to get taken over by filthy capitalists, someone could simply make a new, separate instance and choose not to federate with Lemmy world.

Websites get traded on the backend regularly without hemorrhaging their userbases. A large site is going to have a degree of inertia. People aren't going to all simultaneously pick up out of .world and go to .world2 because someone on le.mee or .shi.tjustworks talks shit about the mods. There's too much of a trust deficit, just for starters. And it would be a two-way street if it wasn't (people in .world claiming le.mee was the one that got taken over and you should decamp from them to our instance).

Past that, you can always make a new website even before federation. The trick is then getting a working community to include you in their network of links and shares. Federation makes that process more explicit and more pronounced. But most local instances have learned not to federate with everyone in the fediverse (because there's so much gnarly shit out there), which means doing promotion and negotiation to get your new instance recognized by the survivors.

In a single case of a single instance getting taken over, migration is possible if a bit painful. But if it happens repeatedly, thanks to a professional business team going after instances strategically while individual largely-ignorant users have to respond organically, then the Fediverse doesn't have a chance over the long term. Eventually, the business interest gets control of enough high profile domains and pollutes the means of interpersonal communication to such a high degree that you either trust your instance or you abandon the Fediverse entirely.

It becomes a game of "Who Is The Werewolf?", which strategically favors the werewolves.