I totally get where Cory is coming from on this. He’s been around long enough to have actually seen these things happen, from a perspective that’s effectively unique. I believe him when he talks about this stuff. I get his point of not putting effort into building up a platform that can hold him and his audience hostage.

but here’s the good part.

People bailing on Twitter to join Bluesky is reasonably easy (there are tools available to find your friends on the new system). If it’s easy to bail on Twitter to join Bluesky, it will be similarly easy to bail on Bluesky to join Mastodon, if/when that becomes necessary.

Google isn’t paying lemmy $60m a year

Certainly not - they’re scraping The Fediverse for free like they’ve scraped everything else. Whether they bother using the scraped data or not is a different story. Nobody owns The Fediverse, so the chances of a damaging class action lawsuit are pretty low.

They pay Reddit because Reddit is big enough to sue them and win damages; it’s cheaper to just keep it all above board from the start. Reddit has a TON of data (human-generated and otherwise).