But Lemmy and Kbin can't just "go corporate" because there is no Lemmy LLC with a CEO and shareholders. Lemmy is open source software that a whole bunch of people have been contributing to (although admittedly, I have no idea who's in charge of approving changes, or how that works). But one thing that MIGHT be true (I'm still figuring this out myself) is that if you and I are excellent coders and we know that lemmy 3.0 is nothing but a corporate cash grab, we can just go back to Lemmy 2.99, and Save As... call it Jemmy, and then anybody who follows us is part of our cool new anti-corporate club.
I think, maybe. I'm not actually sure at all.
The biggest corporatization risk I see is that if one instance, like lemmy.jrubal gets SO big and awesome and concentrated that it would be really painful to leave and start over, then whoever operates lemmy.jrubal would have the leverage they need to be greedy, until they make it painful enough that people leave.