this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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No, it means if you run Lemmy as a service and make modifications to it, you have to release your modifications back with the same license. Otherwise you couldn't use a browser that's not AGPL and read pages running on top of an AGPL server.
What AGPL is really good at is how nobody can take Lemmy, run a proprietary service and add incompatible features without giving them back to the community. So nobody can fork Lemmy, create a new VC-backed Reddit clone and start making incompatible changes to the source without the main project getting the source code.
Unfortunately it's still possible to rewrite a VC-backed clone and start making incompatible changes. Think about Facebook's "threads.net". They sure did not take Lemmy source code.
Threads isn't a Lemmy server, it's a proprietary platform that happens to "speak" ActivityPub.
Yeah sorry, confused things. It's comes closer to a Mastodon thing. The point is that a big corporation like Facebook does not need to use AGPL code as long as they can just re-implement it. Compared to the total codebase used at Facebook, re-implementing something like lemmy or mastodon does not sound like a big deal. (That's not an argument against using the AGPL)