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?
Lemmy and Kbin are just open-source software that can be run on servers. To answer your question, in short, the community has the most influence over the fediverse.
I don’t have a problem with the software … I know it is open source and made available - its the main reason why I went onto Lemmy and Kbin
I’m not so concerned with the software … its the costs of running these services that end up becoming an issue with users, instance owners and admins … running services takes money, renting servers takes money, bandwidth takes money, having people run, operate and maintain these services is unpaid labour
I like using these things for free like anyone else … but I think our community should build a culture of encouraging people to subscribe, pay or donate to instance owners, software developers, open source software in order to help the people that maintain these things and keep these services, software and projects out of corporate hands.
If we let them all suffer without funding … the owners will eventually look for ways to make money on their own … and depending on who these people are and how desperate they can become with rising costs … Lemmy, Kbin, Mastadon could all grow to become the next corporate owned Reddit all over again
Your concerns are valid but the whole point of fediverse is so that anyone can host their own instances, as with the users are encouraged to sign up different instances instead of a central one so will the cost never be as astronomical as something like Youtube or Reddit and there will not be a catastrophic loss even if a major instance does go down. While I agree admins should be allowed to have donations accepted, I don’t think admins should treat this as a business at the first place.
TL;DR: For a not so huge volume instance, the cost isn’t as high as people would think, I believe the community can sustain itself.
It’s hard to accept anything is ‘free’ these days. “If it’s free, you’re the product”, comes to mind. It’s not ad revenue clearly (yet). Are we giving info to data brokers? Someone somewhere has to be making money off this.
I don’t particularly care that I’m being exploited for revenue, but I do like to know how the exploitation is happening.
It’s a very sad commentary on the world we live in that we can’t just have something nice as a community without someone trying to make a buck, but it’s certainly what we’re used to.
But Lemmy and Kbin can’t just “go corporate” because there is no Lemmy LLC with a CEO and shareholders. Lemmy is open source software that a whole bunch of people have been contributing to (although admittedly, I have no idea who’s in charge of approving changes, or how that works). But one thing that MIGHT be true (I’m still figuring this out myself) is that if you and I are excellent coders and we know that lemmy 3.0 is nothing but a corporate cash grab, we can just go back to Lemmy 2.99, and Save As… call it Jemmy, and then anybody who follows us is part of our cool new anti-corporate club.
I think, maybe. I’m not actually sure at all.
The biggest corporatization risk I see is that if one instance, like lemmy.jrubal gets SO big and awesome and concentrated that it would be really painful to leave and start over, then whoever operates lemmy.jrubal would have the leverage they need to be greedy, until they make it painful enough that people leave.
It almost feels like it should use tax money to be up and running you know ? Like the government take a tax on everyone and they use this money to help the community run their infrastructure.
Let’s use the people’s money to build a good social network!