Honestly, users that can’t be bothered to check and subscribe to all knitting communities (which is really easy) will be snatched away from the first corporate alternative with more polish.

Open source applications rarely beat corporate ones in polish and ease of use; these aren’t the battles we have to fight. Lemmy is already near identical to reddit once you sign up and subscribe to the communities that interest you.

You’re missing the point of having a decentralized network. As long as people are allowed to spin up their own instance, duplicate communities are bound to exist. You can view both of them or choose which one you prefer.

What you describe is a big problem for generic communities such as YouShouldKnow, NoStupidQuestions etc and even hobbies where most of the people practicing them aren’t good with tech.

For more niche stuff Lemmy works better because if you want to talk about, say, communism you can go to lemmygrad.ml and instantly get a front page with communities about communism. If Lemmy continues to grow I expect we’ll see more themed instances pop up (e.g. about gaming, technology, fitness) and Lemmy’s advantages over Reddit will be seen more clearly.

My understanding is a little shaky too. I suppose companies are incentivized to target infinite growth so they can get the most money out of the stocks they hold, but this is a culture and greed thing, not a hard requirement.

I know about dividends but decided to keep the comment simple. Aren’t dividends relevant only in utility and holding companies?

Correct me if I’m wrong but this is baked into capitalism. Stocks are attractive to investors because they want to sell them for a higher price later on, and stock prices increase when the company grows.