As the mainstream media contracts ... it makes it even more important to have outlets like Lemmy for everyone to use.
Online media and social media systems (including private ones) are the modern newspapers of our era.
If you want to protect this small little instance you are on with Lemmy, Kbin, Mastadon, or whatever else ... SUPPORT YOUR INSTANCE .. give a bit of money to finance them because they need the support ... otherwise, as they become more and more popular and their costs increase over time, eventually, they too will get to the point of just being bought and sold like any other media outlet.
It's all done and organized through the owners and managers of the instance you are on. Go onto the main community or main page of your instance and look up the owners and managers of the instance, most of them have a section directing users on how and where to donate or contribute.
We have to normalize donating to these services ... otherwise, they just get lost all over again because the owners can't keep paying for things out of their pocket that others enjoy for free.
The nature of competition is to have a winner. When your economy is competitive in nature and any body with the power to redistribute things when they get too concentrated chooses not to, for whatever reason, you get this.
The Monopoly game only ends when someone wins decisively or someone flips the table out of exasperation. The police exist to prevent ordinary citizens from rising up and flipping the table
It used to be that the government would force companies to break up when they got too big. Hasn't happened in decades though. Government is too corrupt now.
How many large somewhat independent papers even exist now? The only ones I can think of are Le Devoir and La Presse, I can't think of any English publications