"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "
They are talking about the people developing lemmy, not some petty fight with the admins of one specific instance.
The Lemmy devs have no power over instances they do not run themselves.
Other than writing the software that all of those instances use to stay up to date and in contact with each other, regardless of their federation status.
can’t people just take the lemmy source code and make their own version of the lemmy api?
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Sure, technically. But good luck getting anyone to use your version over the mass adopted one. And good luck fitting back in if they decide to take their fork in a direction you dont like, which isolates your instance further and further.
It’s because the current version has nothing wrong with it. If the Lemmy devs should choose to sabotage the Lemmy software, you’d be surprised how easily that happens when it pisses off all the instances and their owners. Instances will simply refuse to upgrade. And like most things, eventually some fork will win the race to become the dominant fork and the current Lemmy devs would be essentially disowned. Different forks also doesn’t necessarily mean API breaking changes, so different forks would have no issue communicating (at least for a while).