The strength of the fediverse is that it’s a whole network of individually owned servers. The weakness of the fediverse is that it’s a whole network of individually ownwed servers.

it’s a strength because you don’t rely on large companies and are closer from the internet as it was designed with a decentralized network of equal importances server rather than a few big one. Which limits the power of the people owning the server and let having diverse moderation policies (e.g. I am all in letting a space for far righter mocking left-winter on Lemmygrad, but I am glad my instance doesn’t federate with them)

It’s a weakness, because the person running the instance may-close it tomorrow, many instance relies on someone spare ressources in time/infrastructure/money, some would accept donations,some are run by larger non profit (which also rely on donation, but have a legal structure to take them). It also means that they don’t have the legal ressource to know the exact limit between legal and illegal leading to critic about their moderation closing community about topic like piracy Thread

the cool thing is that even if an instance closes, migration is fairly easy, so the impact is limited. It can be frustrating, I remember the closing of a large forum where I was involved in the large 00’s which was quite frustrating for contributors (It was like a server crash followed by a corrupted backup, shit happens)

Note also that proprietary social media do close too, remember when google closed plus or wave ? or when yahoo close yahoogroups ? it’s not like being owned by a large company means it’ll be open forever (look at US trying to ban tik tok)