For an individual instance, yeah. But one of the points of federation is to make it easier for users to simply move to an alternative instance if something like that starts to happen. It greatly reduces vender lock-in.

No. Mastodon has 9 million users and is doing fine. There are other federated projects like Matrix and PeerTube which also have more users than Lemmy. Unlike Reddit they don't belong to some monopoly that could take them offline.

Big instances, but not the federation as a whole.

Hopefully not. My fear is that eventually Lemmy will be over run with bots and troll farms like Reddit was. I like that here I feel like I'm able to communicate with real people and would hate to see that change.

I doubt we'd see something like Reddit is doing now with the API and forcing ads because of how easy it is to move to another instance that isn't inundated with those issues.

It depends on if one of the creators take legal control and make it a publicly traded company somehow. So far though, they've done their best to say they won't do that.

No, because competition is built in by federation.

Let's say a major instance does some BS like reddit... we just export our accounts to another instance, and bam, they have no power over us.

I mean the chances of that happening may occur to some instances, however because Lemmy is decentralized, it will probably not happen to the whole thing and I'm confident in the leadership of Lemmy.

No, because federated.

Lemmy itself is just ran by regular people. If one instance begins to moderate in a strange way or begins to allow things it shouldn't allow. One can simply leave and move on to another instance

As there are individual servers, if one server sold out users could move to others, and continue, no?