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Two reasons:
Both of these reasons only remain true if Lemmy stays small.
Imagine GIMP is enshitified somehow. Well that won't work because the source code is available and people will just create a fork and work with that instead.
There's many Lemmy and Mastodons servers AND clients out there, being open source is already one thing add federation on top and you see no one really is in control of Lemmy or Mastodon as a whole.
Is Gimp as fragmented as Lemmy? If I want to use the blue tool do I have to use Gimp A, and crop Gimp B? With Lemmy entire genres could just disappear if my iteration defederates with the interaction that hosted all the interesting topics. If that happens then the community all gets split up among other communities which likely will never come back whole again. It’s the Linux model, which is fine for longevity and availability, but it’s not good for keeping like minded people together. Fragmentation might be fine for a tool, but it’s not great for community.
Kind of like our worlds nations!
This is the whole point of federation, having multiple instances, and being open source. It's also why a bunch of the people on here are Linux heads.
Keep on mind that lemmy isn't owned by a single corporation ir organization. It is a bunch of individually owned instances that talk to each other. This means that if you own an instance, you have contr of how it is moderated, but you have to balance that freedom with making your instance a place other instances will have to connect to. Its very democratic.
This goes all the way to the source code, which is open. So, even if the devs try to change it and exert more control, it could be forked.
Of course, you could still be a doomer and say something could come along and ruin it. But, it's at least better than private, venture funded internet platforms on paper.
Since when is Lemmy "a website"?
I'm sure there are more but here's a few off the top of my head:
The ability to defederate from any instance that tries. truthsocial.com and gab.com are based on Mastodon, and they're cut off from the Fediverse because they're "downhill" to put it lightly. If the instance you're on starts acting funky you can just pack up and leave. If Facebook starts asking for your driver's license where are you going to go? There is no other Facebook, and your friends wouldn't be there if there was.
The ability/culture for users to donate to their instance admins. Your instance admin should transparently list all their costs and donations, so everyone is aware how much is needed to cover infrastructure. Not counting volunteer hours, it's very cheap to run these servers as long as the average person kicks in a buck every so often. The amount an average person needs to donate is probably like 5-10 cents a month, which can easily be covered by generous patrons. I personally donate about $10/month to my instance, which is way overkill and probably covers a significant chunk of their operating expenses (not that they need my money, I'm sure).
No inherent need for people to use the software. No one is making money from higher site activity time, there's no need to have black box algorithms that try to keep you engaged by promoting ragebait etc
Decentralized nature makes it impossible to "buy it out". Technically a company could probably coerce an existing Fedi server to sell so they can start causing chaos, but they can't just drop $44 billion and nonconsensually steal the website from every user. Spread out among the servers and protections will only grow stronger.
but they can’t just drop $44 billion and nonconsensually steal the website from every user.
Thanks for the detailed response! Sorry for the dumb question but: Why can't someone buy Eugen Rochko's company for $44 billion?
Way outside my wheelhouse so take the following with a grain of salt, but TMK the company that "owns" Mastodon is a non-profit LLC named Mastoton gGmbH and probably isn't technically worth anything by itself. Not that they would ever sell to you, but by purchasing, you wouldn't own the codebase or any of the instances. The community would immediately fork the codebase, most of the members of the Mastodon gGmbH would leave and reincorporate as a new entity and continue their work on the codebase, and life would go on without much of a hitch.
Edit: Here is the official post that Mastodon made about registering as a gGmbH, which includes some important info about how a gGmbH works, and how it includes some some restrictions that really prevent any value from being extracted out of a potential purchase.
This makes sense, thanks!