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?
This analogy should be the top comment. Fediverse services are like email services. They’re basically interchangeable. If your email service starts to suck, you get a new email address. It’s a huge pain to move all your old email, copy your contacts, set up redirections, and then change your contact info everywhere, but what’s the alternative? Are you not going to have an email address?
If ActivityPub services become the kind of de facto standard that email did, unless you’re a server admin the instances will fade into the background noise of the internet, just like your email server has. Once we establish the standards on how a server should be maintained and moderated, it will become easier to see and ban rogue operators, just the way we do with email spammers now.
Does anybody worry about the political leanings of their office Exchange365 administrator?
Ok, that explains all these different instances. But this analogy relates ActivityPub protocol to simple email protocol. Then, it should mean that all different federated services like Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin are various servers (similar to Gmail, yahoo) and have to be owned by someone who regulates them. So can you make it bit more clear!
Kind of, but there is one more layer.
ActivityPub allows more than one type of data (or rather it’s all just data, it’s the medium in which the user uses it?). MSTDN.ca, Lemmy.ca, lemmy.world, et al are the equivalents of an email server. Lemmy, kbin, Mastodon are different services running on the ActivityPub backbone. There is a fair amount of cross-compatibility, since they are all using ActivityPub. You can easily subscribe to a Lemmy community with your Mastodon account, or a kbin magazine with your Lemmy account. It just might be a little messy.
Remember when Microsoft started pushing “rich” email? If you were using a text based email client, you’d get all the HTML formatting tags. It was still email, you could still read it, it was just messy. Likewise, my experience with Lemmy via Mastodon was that you loose the threading and grouping. Comments tended to show as random messages out of context. Absolutely works, just less nice than using Lemmy for Lemmy and Mastodon for Mastodon. I will say that kbin magazines seem fine on Lemmy, but I haven’t really played with kbin yet, so I may not know what I’m missing.
So the email analogy has it’s limits. BeeHaw.org, Lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works are like email servers that all focus on one format of email. MSTDN.ca, mastodon.social, mas.to, Universeodon.com, etc. are also all email servers focusing on a different format for email. They can all talk to each other, but emails from the wrong format won’t fit in as well.
I think your question and my answer strain the limits of using an an analogy to simplify a concept. Might be almost ready to abandon analogy and just directly learn about Federation.
Does anybody worry about the political leanings of their office Exchange365 administrator?
Yes, I worry about whoever controls the spam filter. I check my spam folder often. I’ve caught many mistakes, but haven’t noticed any clear political bias. Yet. But the great thing is, if I ever do, it’s possible to switch. If I’m especially masochistic, I can even be the one controlling the spam filter.
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
hello! i’m the current owner & admin of lemmy.ca.
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?
i don’t really consider myself very policital, but I have taken those “vote compass” things just to see where I would fall, and i typically lean left. not sure exactly what you mean by easily influenced, but I would hope that I’m not. I think of myself as fairly level-headed, and probably overly analytical about things, and I typically don’t try and let my emotions get involved in my decision making.
I have to run but can answer more questions if you’d like. or i can maybe do an AMA later?
That’s amazing that you responded … that would never happen to any commercial social media service out there.
Thanks for that.
My concern is not so much what your personality or political leanings are … to a degree, if any owner holds extreme views, it should be concerning.
My biggest concern is money and funds - where it comes from and where it goes.
The work you guys (owners of an instance) are doing is admirable but no one should expect you guys to provide any and all of these services for free. I am sure you are working hard and tirelessly to keep this instance working and maintained but it must take up a considerable amount of your time and energy. Which begs the question, how do you make your money? Do you have a separate job … or do you make any money by running this instance? And also, what are your costs in being able to maintain this instance? Do you break even? Are you running a loss? Are you making a profit?
My questions are two fold because I would like to know if you are benefiting from this work … and I would be the first to congratulate you on that.
The other side of that question is … if you are suffering a loss … shouldn’t we be helping you with your work? We shouldn’t be taking your work and energy for granted and expect you to work for free, pay for services for us who enjoy them. Even if you are able to pay for services, hardware and rentals … we shouldn’t expect you to work for free.
I know you have to maintain your own privacy but as users of your service, it would be nice to know what your situation is … maybe you are independently wealthy and you don’t care about money … I don’t know. Or maybe you have no money at all and you are barely getting by.
If you do need funds … I would be more than willing to donate, subscribe or sign onto a subscription to keep this instance running.
Hey @smorks I am interested to hear how you will handle content that some people may view as “hateful”? One of the problems I often see in some reddit communities is that they can be heavy-handed on moderation and it can often mean the subreddit is filled with primarily left-leaning comments as the right-leaning comments are counted as “hateful”. I’m personally looking for an instance where I can see a diverse set of viewpoints and based on what you said here it sounds like this may be an instance that is supportive of that.
Just to be clear, I am not asking whether people would be allowed to be blatantly racist, but whether people could disagree with political movements that lean right/left without being censored? I personally think communities thrive when they can have more open, productive good-faith conversations about topics. When people get censored it usually seems to create more division and more hate in my opinion.
htpps:/lemmy.world is run by Ruud Schilders (@ruud@lemmy.world) and htpps://lemmy.ca is run by Andy Brandt (@smorks@lemmy.ca). 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)
I think it is important information to know … Reddit was started by a small group of tech developers who then went on to sell their site to a large media corporation … and for many years, everyone just hoped that the corporation would stay open and free for everyone forever.
The same concern should be made aware for us all here … we can’t expect these owners, moderators and instance owners to just pay for stuff, run them for free and we get to enjoy them for nothing. If owners start feeling the pinch of costs, funds, money and resources because their instance becomes too popular, eventually one of two things happen … they either shut down / slow down / degrade … or they start seeing monetary value to their work and think of selling it to someone or something for a profit.
As I said to many of my responses … if I know of an owner or developer that needs money to keep these tools operating … I would be more than willing to pay for something or help out financially in some way … I’m not rich and neither are the majority of users on here, but maybe all of us together sending a bit of cash to the right people, we can keep these services from falling into corporate hands.
I think the advantage here is that the average instance size can remain small and relevant to the individual users values without sacrificing the amount of content available in one spot. The owner of lemmy.world (for now) is easier to reach out to and share concerns with. You can’t go directly to Spez or to Reddit’s future shareholders with a problem in the same way you could with an instance’s owner. It’s the (im)perfect blend of old school bb forums and the mega platforms.
The biggest issue with the fediverese is the non-transferable nature of your profile. If that can be resolved, I’m all in. Afaik that is a planned feature for Lemmy in particular.
Which leads to the question … what if the owner no longer has any money to pay $20 / month … what if his instance grows popular and now he has to pay $40/month $100/month $500/month … I can appreciate the goodwill of people but whenever anyone puts lots of energy into any activity, eventually it costs money, time and effort … all of which does not come for free and usually comes with a price
I don’t own this instance. But I run my own. I do so that I can control my access and am in control of my destiny. I have been going back and forth, pretty heavily, about opening it up come July.
I have worked in IT infrastructure/operations for years so I know the responsibilities, hence the hesitation because if I do allow others on it, it ups the stakes a bit.
Personally I know the costs. I am willing to accept them, and do not have any interest in increasing them to accommodate more than my instance can handle. Nor do I have much interest in policing and moderating people or communities. So if I opened my instance it would be solely so others can federate and join witb other instances. Drama someone caused would be dealt with my removing the drama.
“you mean to tell me that different entities can communicate with each others without a ceo ? Preposterous !”
I own some of it.
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.
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.
