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?
Whoever is running the instance.
Lemmy, kbin, and mastodon all use activitypub to share content between instances. Each instance is run by a different person or group than the others.
The hardware depends, but usually is owned by a hosting company (cloud) or an independent operator.
The software is open source and isn’t really owned by anyone.
Admins are whoever the server owner determines. I’m not sure how moderators are defined on Lemmy, though likely dealt with on a per-community basis.