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?
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.
Difference is that Lemmy is open source, anyone can start the whole thing again if things go south. Reddit is closed source, only they can run it, and they definitely don’t want to release the source because they are aiming to control the market and go to stock market.
Reddit used to be open source too the problem with centralized software like that is that even if you start up your own instance (and lots of people did) it’s completely empty and it’s going to STAY completely empty forever unless you also get users posting things, which they’re not going to do because you’re empty.
The idea of Fediverse is that you can break down that impossible barrier to entry by communicating with all the other sites in the Fediverse even as a brand new site. Even though when you start your Fediverse server it starts out empty, it can pick up all the content from every other Fediverse site in the world (gradually) and get you past that initial roadblock, treating you as a potentially valuable partner and not a competitor. And if a big site goes away, their content is still with you, and everyone else.
It’s not going to magically get you users, but maybe you don’t want users, and all you want is the content. Or maybe it will buy you enough time to get the users you want to get. No matter what, while it’s not a magic wand and building an active community is always going to be hard, it’s certainly a step above Reddit’s retracted “open source” offering in the way that it tries to encourage and support people to start their own communities. It’s more than just throwing some software at them and saying good luck, it’s also giving you content, and communication, and hopefully eventually even more as it grows and matures into the future.
I am really eager to see what kind of content discovery / search / recommendations people can start building on top of Fediverse and ActivityPub, I think that’s the next step. Reddit’s search and community discovery has always sucked, and Youtube’s recommendation algorithm has always been untrustworthy, and I think things like that tells us it’s probably a hard problem, but I look forward to seeing what the platform can do.
Reddit was able to go closed source because the code was only being run by one entity. Their code was years out of date when they stopped claiming to be open source, because they weren’t actually using their GitHub repo for the site.
Lemmy won’t have this problem because it isn’t one monolithic instance.
While I agree in principle with the idea that we shouldn’t be freeloaders, there is another side to it.
I used to put a dozen hours a week into unpaid tech support for all comers, just because it was fun and it helped out the community. When I moved away, I started doing other things (volunteer firefighter, etc.)
My brother pours tons of work into his custom birdhouses and they are very popular. He absolutely refuses to take any compensation because it is a labour of love.
I don’t expect that any one instance will remain available and viable over the long term. If things look dire or the mood strikes me, I’ll look into spinning up an instance, just as part of being a good citizen. I assume that human nature will ensure that there are plenty of people like me.
I’ll kick in a few bucks here and there and human nature means that there are plenty of others doing that, too.
Never underestimate the drive of someone with a hobby! Hell, I wish my hobbies ran to only a couple of hundred dollars a month!
Same here … I’ve been involved in lots of construction, renovations and building over my lifetime … my family owned a construction business so I know a little of everything - plumbing, electrical, construction, woodworking, structure, concrete, HVAC, roofing, landscaping, heavy equipment and all sorts of other things construction related
Yes, I’m like you … I love what I do and I enjoy helping people out with big or small projects when I feel like it … but often there comes a time when the work is so big, so time consuming and costs me money that it makes one wonder why I should do the work … it also makes me wonder sometimes if people are just taking advantage of me.
I love doing stuff for people … but I also appreciate it when people give something back for the free work you offered them … especially when there was a lot of work or energy or skill involved.
The work you do may not seem like much … but to have the skill, knowledge, education and training that you have in order to complete complex technical tasks is worth a lot of money … especially for us who don’t have that knowledge … never sell your abilities short. It may seem like nothing to you but it is a world of difference that many of us can not cross.
I understand how feel because I feel the same when I help out others too … but I also believe that we should foster and build a culture of encouraging everyone to contribute a little bit of money everywhere to experts and knowledgeable people like you, to owners of instances, to developers of open source software and to those advocating for all of this … if we don’t, we will always run the risk of all this activity and all these projects becoming lost either by burning out all this volunteerism or creating situations where owners become so desperate for money that they see no other option than to sell their work and their efforts to the highest bidder.
You raise some important points. When I started providing tech support to all comers, it was about building a community. There did come a time though when too many were exploiting my skills in that it was all take and no give. After that, I started working only by referral and eventually transitioned to that field as my living, rather than a hobby.
I think we have to be willing to throw a bit of cash around, but not everyone can support every worthwhile endeavour.
Each operator has to find their own balance.