I mean, every website except one you run on your own hardware has this exact problem: whoever is running it owns it completely, and they set the rules (within legal boundaries).
The only ways you can avoid this are:
Run your websites yourself (which is kinda low-value; imagine the Geocities era, but everyone has to set up the hardware and the networks and the domain names and everything themselves), or…
Stick to websites that have an easy “escape hatch”, where you can easily bail at any time. This is how Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin and the Fediverse at large are designed: if your local server admin sucks, well, you can just join a different server, and you can still see content from all the other servers as before (assuming the place you “escaped” to hasn’t blocked them).
It will be the case with the fediverse in general. But the point of the federation is to make it easier to switch instance, reducing the power of the owners.
An ideal solution to this would be a fully distributed system. But this has many technical challenges as it pushes the complexity on the client side. And the moderation is then also more complex. Federation aims at finding the good trade-off between giving power to a few capable people to manage the network, yet making it difficult for them to abuse the system as users can easily switch ship without losing their entire social network. This is similar to emails - changing your email address is a pain, but you don’t lose your contacts and can still talk to people with your new address.
Sounds like an unhealthy powermod situation again
I mean, every website except one you run on your own hardware has this exact problem: whoever is running it owns it completely, and they set the rules (within legal boundaries).
The only ways you can avoid this are:
With Lemmy you can do both. A lot of people are setting up small, <10 user instances to control their data and stay out of federation drama.
It will be the case with the fediverse in general. But the point of the federation is to make it easier to switch instance, reducing the power of the owners.
An ideal solution to this would be a fully distributed system. But this has many technical challenges as it pushes the complexity on the client side. And the moderation is then also more complex. Federation aims at finding the good trade-off between giving power to a few capable people to manage the network, yet making it difficult for them to abuse the system as users can easily switch ship without losing their entire social network. This is similar to emails - changing your email address is a pain, but you don’t lose your contacts and can still talk to people with your new address.
This is a question regardless of instance and the size of the instance. At least in my mind.
Personally I don’t have too much concern right now but if anything happens that changes that then I’ll just leave.