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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It doesn't matter who the devs are because the code is open source. The beauty of the fediverse is that nobody controls it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 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…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would be exactly what I mean by "wither". Lack of developers means a lack of updates.

OpenOffice updates are orders of magnitude less impactful than LibreOffice. Pretty much all the developers went with LibreOffice. OpenOffice still works, it's still available, but it is much less vibrant. Much less, alive? Like it's "withered".

You could absolutely fork Lemmy, and of Lemmy improves it's sorting, adds other features, tweaks, improvements, etc. your fork wouldn't include those. If there was enough developer interest, your fork could parallel those changes, or it could even go in a different direction. Without developers though, it would just be stagnant.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Lemmy has two developers. Many AP projects run with just one developer. If someone's project lacks one developer, that's their choice to end the project. It's not "withering due to a lack of developers." It's being closed entirely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

you can also read it duh

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

You really need to seperate the development of Lemmy from administrating a Lemmy instance. The political views of the devs don't matter at all. You don't support these by using Lemmy.

[–] Discoslugs 1 points 1 year ago

Open source just means that they're not doing stuff behind your back that you're not unaware of like collecting your data.

This is kinda dubious answer. Open source just means the devs post the source code and usually that it is published under an open source license.

Devs can put what they want in it. It requires people to audit the code to see if it is safe to use. Or that it does what it says it does.