There’s a possible future where major fediverse sites switch to whitelisted federation to deal with spam etc. At that point, your small instance would have to petition all the major players to be let in. That would probably kill off most small instances.
My biggest fear is if some corpos decide to set up mega instances and start dominating Lemmy by doing this, since corpos probably have the best budgets to set up massive server infrastructure. I think the more Lemmy grows the more attention it’ll get from corpos, which is not great.
The alternative is already corpo owned from the start. The nice thing with Lemmy is that a server can choose to federate or not that said corpo owned federated server.
Big corpos will always try to get their greasy hands on anything that they feel can make them money. But at least we have tools to not see those servers if so is the wish.
I can imagine that something like approval instances make sense. Larger instances could connect to these to automatically federate with all the small instances that get approved by them. If an approval instance doesn’t handle spam well, large instances could still defedarate.
