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 get that people need their privacy … I don’t need to know the intimate details of a person’s life in order to get a sense of who they are
My biggest concerns are towards money … how they make it, how they spent it, what are their costs and are they making or losing money?
Everyone keeps saying just run your own instance … great … that could work for a very small group of people but it would still take plenty of energy, time and money to maintain that little instance among friends … imagine what the costs end up becoming if you run an instance very well and gain lots of popularity? The costs quickly add up.
Then the concern becomes, how does the instance owner pay for all this? And will they continue to run a loss or did they gain a way to generate profit? or most worryingly will they ever try to monetize their instance and sell it to the highest bidder?
You can run your own instance and not allow anyone else to sign up, though I do agree the effort it requires if it’s just for a single person is a lot. Spread out amongst friends, or other folks who don’t mind chipping in, makes it seem a bit more sensible. But there is always the option to turn off registrations, and on Lemmy at least you can make registrations require approval.
The only other way your instance could incur more running costs than you’d like is if you have a community on your instance that gets very popular, and folks from all instances start posting to it (think stuff on Beehaw, Lemmy.world, etc.) Then your server needs to be the man in the middle, facilitating communication between users of other communities. But you always have the option of not allowing communities to be created, or stopping federation altogether if it gets to be too much. There really isn’t a way it would suddenly cost you more money than you thought, unless you aren’t monitoring it enough (which isn’t much more than setting up notification emails for storage use, system crashes, etc).
Running your own instance is the only way to really be sure that the costs are being covered on the up-and-up. Otherwise you’re just taking folks at their word. Your data, in the end, could always be sold to anyone. It is publically available through the ActivityPub protocol, after all. But that also means there’s really no need to pay for it, so no one would buy it.
Internet hosting isn’t actually that insanely expensive. I suspect that it isn’t a massive system for most except the bigger instances. Donations is so far the only way instances get money afaik, whether directly or through Patreon.
No, absolutely do not run your own instance, that’s absurd. That’s like saying you shouldn’t bother using email if you don’t host your own server.
Your concerns make sense, they have complete access to anything you post and I can’t imagine that any sort of messages are encrypted. That’s just true. They could theoretically take your posts and sell them for profit, though anyone can already do that by simply federating with your server.
Anyway.
There’s a limit. Just assume anything you post is not private for sure. I don’t know if you can edit things, but I’d be shocked if it were impossible for an admin to. Maybe I’m wrong, they’re such early software…
The good news is that in theory you should be able to migrate your entire account from the one you are on to a new one if you don’t like the policy. Maybe? Not sure if that works yet.
But no, do not roll your own instance, that is silly and ruins discovery. At the same time be aware that the one you are on is ultimately owned by someone with the root password.
It’s not doable yet, but as far as I know it’s something that’s being worked on