Trying to wrap my head around the fediverse. Is each instance like another person with a server? Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?

Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?

Sorry I’m sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense! I love the idea of the fediverse as I understand it, but I like to dig into these details.

  • TWeaKEnglish
    7•9 months ago

    And there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s simply how a decentralized network works.

    It’s also how the internet works, and you wouldn’t need to set up an instance to scrape the data from lemmy.

    • @[email protected]
      5•9 months ago

      True, what I mean is that federation removes the need for scraping since the data is delivered to you in its purest form.

      • TWeaKEnglish
        4•9 months ago

        Yeah API access is more efficient for the host than delivering the human-viewable content. Hence why Twitter and others always used to have their API open, so they could minimise the load from scraping.