If you don’t understand why that is not true of things like lemmy, you do not understand lemmy
lemmy cannot be bought in the same way that Linux cannot be bought. You may buy an instance (or a distro) but that doesn’t (and can’t) get you the whole lot. Anyone could start a new instance, thwarting your bid to collect all the users
Everything can be bought.
If you don’t understand why that is not true of things like lemmy, you do not understand lemmy
lemmy cannot be bought in the same way that Linux cannot be bought. You may buy an instance (or a distro) but that doesn’t (and can’t) get you the whole lot. Anyone could start a new instance, thwarting your bid to collect all the users
I guess you don’t know the history of XMPP…