Yeah it’s changed focus a few times. They focused on music for a while, then pivoted to entertainment news. Surprisingly they still have around 100 employees.
Some years ago they “lost” a lot of data during a data center migration. MySpace was the go-to place for small indie bands in the mid to late 2000s, so a lot of music that was only available on MySpace is totally lost now. People didn’t get a chance to archive it, since MySpace didn’t announce it beforehand.
I say “lost” because my opinion is that it was expensive for them to keep storing all that data and so they just deleted it all and made up an excuse.
Honestly I think a lot of it is that the Fediverse (especially Mastodon) wants to remain a small community relatively isolated from regular social networks, and a very big instance would ruin that. It’s very similar to Usenet when AOL customers got access to it (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
Some people are worried about Meta having their data, but anything you post publicly in the Fediverse is, by definition, public. A whole heap of servers have your data, and even today some of the federated servers could be operated by large companies. How would you know? My Lemmy server is federating with over a thousand others… I don’t know who runs all of those or what they’re doing with the data…
