It’s probably worth noting that this has a lot to do with VCs pumping in a seemingly unlimited amount of funding for services that aren’t profitable yet but has potential to be later. Hence why Twitter is still a thing despite running at a loss for almost its entire lifetime.
Nothing is stopping the user from accessing lemmy.world communities from the alternative instance they chose (unless it has defederated). It’s just that in this case lemmy.world did not want to be responsible for the user’s content.
Abusing admins is nothing new and with reddit you have absolutely 0 recourse besides making a new account at the mercy of the very same admins. On Lemmy at least you can select another instance and still access the same content.
On Android you have to explicitly allow installs from unknown sources and it warns you that it could make it possible to install malware. This has always been enough of a deterrent on Android and I don’t understand why the same can’t be true for iOS.
Don’t see how this is much different to today’s way of doing things where pretty much everyone is a freeloader to the centralized server. The major benefit is that it doesn’t have to be just one server anymore.
Pay walled? There was a popup asking me to log in, but I just closed it and was still able to read the full article. My apologies if that was some kind of trial mode.