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Who owns the Fediverse? I mean who owns and runs the hardware that runs this system? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ininewcrow@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca

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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?

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[–] KingStrafeIV@midwest.social 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Open Source means I can take the code and deploy my own instance without permission from anyone.

[–] Rodeo@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Grimpen@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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…

[–] Adanisi@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] Vilian@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 year ago

you can also read it duh