I’ve been talking to many people about the controversy with Reddit, why I left it and why I went onto Lemmy, Kbin and Mastadon instead. Some of my friends have commented that the control is still a problem as other platforms and it is all dependent on who owns the software, who owns the hardware, who are the admins, who are the moderators and which community or group has the most influence.
Who are these people that influence the most control on the fediverse? Are they Conservative? Are they Liberal? Are they Republican? Are they Democrat? Do they lean to the left of politics? to the right? or are they center? Are they even political? But also if they had to be would they easily or not so easily influenced?
So … for the ELI5 version of the question … Who owns the fediverse?
@ininewcrow
Who owns EMAIL?!? Its the same sort of question… its a protocol to spread or propagate links and other things on the internet WITHOUT a centralized company able to control wat u see to en extent (hence differnect instance) (what you see ) i cant spell and dunt judge me too hrash…, btw does this show as edited?Well the main developers of lemmy and admins of lemmy.ml are communists, if I recall correctly.
But there are already far-right instances.
The answer basically boils down to “Nobody, however it is important to know who runs the largest instances, as they will wield a fair amount of influence”
It doesn’t matter who the devs are because the code is open source. The beauty of the fediverse is that nobody controls it.
Open source just means that they’re not doing stuff behind your back that you’re not unaware of like collecting your data. I don’t think that means that the mods of a specific instance can’t arbitrarily ban users or delete comments and fuck with communities within their instance.
Open Source means I can take the code and deploy my own instance without permission from anyone.
If you can figure it out. Lemmy at this point is probably still straightforward, but for example go try to compile Android. Just compile it. Last time I tried was 2018, but I spent two full days trying before I gave up. And Android is open source.
There are ways to obscure and gate the codebase even if it is open source.
That’s true, I’m just not sure how it’s applicable to the current conversation? I don’t think anyone is making the argument that open source projects are easy?
And you could fork the code, if the original project goes in a direction that isn’t popular. Q.v. LibreOffice and OpenOffice, NextCloud and OwnCloud.
The power of open source/copyleft is that it can’t be owned as such.
There are a couple of caveats, if there aren’t enough developers on the forked project, it will wither. Also, there tends to be lots of fragmentation, as different visions take things in different directions (not a singular project, but what’s your favourite Linux distribution?).
Having said all that, each instance is running on someone’s hardware, and whoever is paying the bills has a lot of sway for that instance. As you say, since it’s open source, there is nothing really stopping you as an individual being that person. A small instance with a user count of 1 is going to be fairly cheap to run. Personally it’s another thing to keep up to date. Maybe with a Docky loader…
A fork of Lemmy won’t “wither” like some other things, because all of this stuff uses the ActivityPub protocol and is compatible anyways. It could be abandoned and still probably work for a long time.
It’s why KBin and Lemmy can work together, even though they are completely different.
you can also read it duh
Well the main developers of lemmy and admins of lemmy.ml are communists,
doubt, but even if yes, their are making a free and open alternative to a money grabbing closed source capitalist owned platform, make sense their political spectrum is leftist, but i also agree they need moderators other them themselves
They definitely are. https://lemmy.ml/post/55143
“While @dessalines and I are communists”
I believe the .ml domain was chosen specifically to signify Marxism-Leninism.
Though I said this as a statement of fact, to answer the question. As a Marxist-Leninist myself I did not mean to imply anything by it.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter in my opinion. People are open to their viewpoints and the good thing about this platform is that the creators viewpoints don’t bring down the individual lemmy instances.
My fear though with these Lemmy instances is that some of them will become dominant, such as maybe this Lemmy.ca instance for Canadian content. It can end up with the same kind of problems reddit faced where communities become echo chambers of one person’s viewpoint and it is hard to move to alternative spots.
Especially when it comes to topics of “hate” and “discrimination”, many people lump a lot of stuff under the “hate speech” category whereas many people would view it as normal non-discriminatory speech. It would be nice to see a place that can support viewpoints that lean far-left, left, center, right, and far right but based on the current rules/dialogue here I fear this community will likely only be more supportive of left sided conversation and will deam differing opinions as “hateful” like we see on Reddit.
The software is open source. No one owns it.
Different instances are run by different people of varying political backgrounds.
Mastodon leans left mostly. Pleroma leans right mostly. Lemmy leans left and even has or had hard coded censorship baked into their software. Misskey is Japanese language mostly, or populated by weebs of all flavors.
Your experience will definitely depend on who’s running the server but the overall integrated platform can’t be shut down by any one person or group. You can always change servers or platforms and reconnect with people.
It’s just a protocol between servers. So no one? Who owns “English”?
Each instance can elect to federate or not federate with others.
So the question just goes down one level … who owns the instance? It’s an important question as it then determines what influence can occur with any instance or any owner or owners of an instance.
Yes, no one can own the English language but the language can only occur because each and everyone of us own the hardware because the hardware is built into our bodies.
A fediverse instance has to be run from some location and by some hardware … so the question I still wonder about is … who owns any one instance … who owns or controls Lemmy.world? who owns and controls lemmy.ca
htpps:/lemmy.world is run by <redacted> (@[email protected]) and htpps://lemmy.ca is run by <redacted> (@[email protected]). That information literally took me a matter of seconds to google… there’s no conspiracy. The deal is that literally anyone can spin up a server and fire up an instance. The answer is different for every instance (usually).
Your friends are stating the obvious - pretty much everything in the world is owned by someone, whether it’s a Huffy Princess Bike or a message board server. The difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that Lemmy is open source.
If you don’t trust lemmy.world and lemmy.ca for whatever reason, it’s trivial for you to move on to another instance and continue using Lemmy on an instance that makes you feel more comfortable, and still get the Lemmy experience. Or as others have pointed out, spin up your own instance, but with blackjack and hookers, then you can defederate from whomever you wish. That’s when the fun really begins (but by “fun” I mean tremendous workloads and tons of responsibility. And financial costs :p)
A key distinguishing feature of the fediverse is decentralization. There is no central authority that controls or determines what is acceptable as each instance is independent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
You can create your own instance or choose one from those that match your own affinities ✌
Running your own instance seems to be a common answer here … that is probably correct but most of us do not have the time, the resources or the skill to do such things … which is why we rely on others to run the instances and hope that they are accountable enough to the people they have allowed onto their instance.
Bottom line is … whoever is running the instance … yes the software is open and available … the services are open and available … but …
The monetary costs are running / owning / renting hardware … having the skill and training and knowledge to setup / run / maintain / update these systems on your own … taking the time to maintain all this on your own … and the costs only increase as your instance becomes more and more popular with more users accessing more and more content.
I will keep accessing the fediverse from an instance I’ve signed up for at lemmy.ca … and I will support them because now I am starting to realize that the only way we can keep this new form of social media free and open is if we all step up and support those who volunteer their time and effort to run these systems for us who can’t or don’t want to.
Lots of non-techie people rely on their techie friends to fix their broken wifi or crashed laptop for free and us techie friends still do it, sometimes with a grumble, but just as often with a smile. It’s great that you’re looking to compensate and support the people running these sites and I strongly encourage you to do so, the more you do the more practical and reliable the network will be. I just want you to keep it in perspective that as long as there are techie people out there who like to play with this sort of stuff in their spare time, and enjoy the feeling of “contributing”, and believe me there are lots of us, we don’t need to live in terror of all the server gods deciding one day that it’s too expensive and the whole network shuts down. There will always be lots and lots of people running small nodes and contributing far more than their fair share, and that’s okay. While they someday may not be enough to support the whole network on their own, they probably are right now and I think it’s still much too early to be alarmed about the health of the network or that there’s too much centralization on a few big servers. That will pass, and if it doesn’t, you can be sure people will keep relentlessly talking about it, because it’s important.
