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?
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by personal instance? Only you use it? I’m wondering what reasons someone would have a personal instance. Or maybe like a group for friends only?
There’s a variety of reasons for this depending on the person, but common ones I’ve read are along the lines of curiosity & enjoying experimenting with the software, easier to back up their own data, having full control over their instance & so not having to keep up with whether your admins have defederated from another instance while you were away, and so on.
My Lemmy instance acts as a private forum for people I’ve met through a local recreational sports league. I use it to remind people of games and social events.
My Calckey server is just me. I set it up because I wanted to know how to do it, and now I’m my own admin and moderator. It’s a good time.
If you look in the aftermath of the Beehaw defederation, you’ll see a bunch of people whining about “rogue admins”. One option for those folks is to just be their own.