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?
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.
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.
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.