This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.

Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn't until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail -- donations are nice but are never enough.

As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.