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?
@ininewcrow
Who owns EMAIL?!? Its the same sort of question… its a protocol to spread or propagate links and other things on the internet WITHOUT a centralized company able to control wat u see to en extent (hence differnect instance) (what you see ) i cant spell and dunt judge me too hrash…, btw does this show as edited?This analogy should be the top comment. Fediverse services are like email services. They’re basically interchangeable. If your email service starts to suck, you get a new email address. It’s a huge pain to move all your old email, copy your contacts, set up redirections, and then change your contact info everywhere, but what’s the alternative? Are you not going to have an email address?
If ActivityPub services become the kind of de facto standard that email did, unless you’re a server admin the instances will fade into the background noise of the internet, just like your email server has. Once we establish the standards on how a server should be maintained and moderated, it will become easier to see and ban rogue operators, just the way we do with email spammers now.
Does anybody worry about the political leanings of their office Exchange365 administrator?
Ok, that explains all these different instances. But this analogy relates ActivityPub protocol to simple email protocol. Then, it should mean that all different federated services like Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin are various servers (similar to Gmail, yahoo) and have to be owned by someone who regulates them. So can you make it bit more clear!
Kind of, but there is one more layer.
ActivityPub allows more than one type of data (or rather it’s all just data, it’s the medium in which the user uses it?). MSTDN.ca, Lemmy.ca, lemmy.world, et al are the equivalents of an email server. Lemmy, kbin, Mastodon are different services running on the ActivityPub backbone. There is a fair amount of cross-compatibility, since they are all using ActivityPub. You can easily subscribe to a Lemmy community with your Mastodon account, or a kbin magazine with your Lemmy account. It just might be a little messy.
Remember when Microsoft started pushing “rich” email? If you were using a text based email client, you’d get all the HTML formatting tags. It was still email, you could still read it, it was just messy. Likewise, my experience with Lemmy via Mastodon was that you loose the threading and grouping. Comments tended to show as random messages out of context. Absolutely works, just less nice than using Lemmy for Lemmy and Mastodon for Mastodon. I will say that kbin magazines seem fine on Lemmy, but I haven’t really played with kbin yet, so I may not know what I’m missing.
So the email analogy has it’s limits. BeeHaw.org, Lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works are like email servers that all focus on one format of email. MSTDN.ca, mastodon.social, mas.to, Universeodon.com, etc. are also all email servers focusing on a different format for email. They can all talk to each other, but emails from the wrong format won’t fit in as well.
I think your question and my answer strain the limits of using an an analogy to simplify a concept. Might be almost ready to abandon analogy and just directly learn about Federation.
Does anybody worry about the political leanings of their office Exchange365 administrator?
Yes, I worry about whoever controls the spam filter. I check my spam folder often. I’ve caught many mistakes, but haven’t noticed any clear political bias. Yet. But the great thing is, if I ever do, it’s possible to switch. If I’m especially masochistic, I can even be the one controlling the spam filter.
Nobody owns the fediverse. It’s just a network of networks that are interoperable.
Nobody owns Lemmy. It’s just a type of Fediverse software that’s maintained by @dessalines@lemmy.ml and @nutomic@lemmy.ml.
Your admins own your instance. You can find their names on the front page side-bar. For lemmy.ca it’s @smorks and @crb. They’re the ones who have the most control over your experience. It’s best to get a feel for if their interests and values align with yours, and if you can trust them to help curate your experience. They may defederate from communities you may or may not dislike. They may remove users you may or may not find harmful. They may refuse to take such actions as well where you think it would be appropriate.
If they don’t align with you, there’s other instances you can join that may better align with you. Or you can even self-host if you have the technical ability and want a more custom experience.
Well the main developers of lemmy and admins of lemmy.ml are communists, if I recall correctly.
But there are already far-right instances.
The answer basically boils down to “Nobody, however it is important to know who runs the largest instances, as they will wield a fair amount of influence”
Well the main developers of lemmy and admins of lemmy.ml are communists,
doubt, but even if yes, their are making a free and open alternative to a money grabbing closed source capitalist owned platform, make sense their political spectrum is leftist, but i also agree they need moderators other them themselves
They definitely are. https://lemmy.ml/post/55143
“While @dessalines and I are communists”
I believe the .ml domain was chosen specifically to signify Marxism-Leninism.
Though I said this as a statement of fact, to answer the question. As a Marxist-Leninist myself I did not mean to imply anything by it.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter in my opinion. People are open to their viewpoints and the good thing about this platform is that the creators viewpoints don’t bring down the individual lemmy instances.
My fear though with these Lemmy instances is that some of them will become dominant, such as maybe this Lemmy.ca instance for Canadian content. It can end up with the same kind of problems reddit faced where communities become echo chambers of one person’s viewpoint and it is hard to move to alternative spots.
Especially when it comes to topics of “hate” and “discrimination”, many people lump a lot of stuff under the “hate speech” category whereas many people would view it as normal non-discriminatory speech. It would be nice to see a place that can support viewpoints that lean far-left, left, center, right, and far right but based on the current rules/dialogue here I fear this community will likely only be more supportive of left sided conversation and will deam differing opinions as “hateful” like we see on Reddit.
It would be nice to see a place that can support viewpoints that lean far-left, left, center, right, and far right but based on the current rules/dialogue here I fear this community will likely only be more supportive of left sided conversation and will deam differing opinions as “hateful” like we see on Reddit.
Yes, if you hold and communicate far-right views you’re going to have a rough time in a community that leans left-of-center. You’ll be called hateful, a bigot, an asshole, and you’re likely to be censored before too long.
Likewise, if you have and express views that aren’t on the right, or exist as a person who’s not “moral” within the views of the far right (are 2SLGBTQIA+, a person of colour, etc), you’re likely to find that the community you’ve joined is a threat to your safety.
I’m all for echo-chambers, personally, with some degree of variation of course. But it’s perfectly acceptable to look at the political ideology of someone and say that their opinions and views are unacceptable and dangerous, and that they will find themselves unwelcome in a community who’s directly negatively impacted by such views.
The problem I see with echo chambers is that people start to believe their views are normal, but often times they are the extreme minority. It can allow unproductive and toxic ideas in society to spread like a virus that undermines things.
For example, there are groups of people out there who believe the government is trying to give you microchips in vaccines and that they cause autism. The reason people often end up believing these kinds of things is because they get pushed out of regular communities when they start to get attacked and censored for “wrong-think”. Instead of being able to engage in some rational conversations with more rational people they get pushed out if they question things. This often results in them finding a fringe echo chamber of people who are already far deep into this weird viewpoint. Their viewpoints now start to seem to make more sense because everyone around them also feels the same way. They no longer feel like they could be wrong in how they think. Now not only do they get more hardened in their beliefs, but now they also HATE that group that kicked them out.
So in my opinion these echo chambers often lead to more division and more hatred in society. I think when people are forced to absorb more opinions and a differing set of viewpoints they become a smarter, more intelligent thinker.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this shift, but for most of my life I’ve held more liberal values. Nowadays I find I need to call myself a more “traditional liberal” as a lot of current liberal ideologies have shifted to become more far-left. It seems like the division between being liberal and conservative has immensely widened and previously liberal people can often get called conservative despite their views not having changed over the years. Often the vocal minority in a community is able to force people to adhere to their more radical viewpoints or they kick them out of the community.
Overall I just think echo chambers often can just be called a “cult”. Because that’s usually how they operate. Anybody who refuses to accept one narrow viewpoint of the world is cut out of the cult.
It doesn’t matter who the devs are because the code is open source. The beauty of the fediverse is that nobody controls it.
Open source just means that they’re not doing stuff behind your back that you’re not unaware of like collecting your data. I don’t think that means that the mods of a specific instance can’t arbitrarily ban users or delete comments and fuck with communities within their instance.
Open Source means I can take the code and deploy my own instance without permission from anyone.
If you can figure it out. Lemmy at this point is probably still straightforward, but for example go try to compile Android. Just compile it. Last time I tried was 2018, but I spent two full days trying before I gave up. And Android is open source.
There are ways to obscure and gate the codebase even if it is open source.
That’s true, I’m just not sure how it’s applicable to the current conversation? I don’t think anyone is making the argument that open source projects are easy?
And you could fork the code, if the original project goes in a direction that isn’t popular. Q.v. LibreOffice and OpenOffice, NextCloud and OwnCloud.
The power of open source/copyleft is that it can’t be owned as such.
There are a couple of caveats, if there aren’t enough developers on the forked project, it will wither. Also, there tends to be lots of fragmentation, as different visions take things in different directions (not a singular project, but what’s your favourite Linux distribution?).
Having said all that, each instance is running on someone’s hardware, and whoever is paying the bills has a lot of sway for that instance. As you say, since it’s open source, there is nothing really stopping you as an individual being that person. A small instance with a user count of 1 is going to be fairly cheap to run. Personally it’s another thing to keep up to date. Maybe with a Docky loader…
A fork of Lemmy won’t “wither” like some other things, because all of this stuff uses the ActivityPub protocol and is compatible anyways. It could be abandoned and still probably work for a long time.
It’s why KBin and Lemmy can work together, even though they are completely different.
you can also read it duh
The software is open source. No one owns it.
Different instances are run by different people of varying political backgrounds.
Mastodon leans left mostly. Pleroma leans right mostly. Lemmy leans left and even has or had hard coded censorship baked into their software. Misskey is Japanese language mostly, or populated by weebs of all flavors.
Your experience will definitely depend on who’s running the server but the overall integrated platform can’t be shut down by any one person or group. You can always change servers or platforms and reconnect with people.
It had hard coded censorship. It got removed because it ran into the Scunthorpe problem and also was blocking certain nonenglish words that were slurs in english. I believe now there’s a configurable file you can set for your own filter now.
Tom Scott did a video on that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE
A key distinguishing feature of the fediverse is decentralization. There is no central authority that controls or determines what is acceptable as each instance is independent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
You can create your own instance or choose one from those that match your own affinities ✌
Running your own instance seems to be a common answer here … that is probably correct but most of us do not have the time, the resources or the skill to do such things … which is why we rely on others to run the instances and hope that they are accountable enough to the people they have allowed onto their instance.
Bottom line is … whoever is running the instance … yes the software is open and available … the services are open and available … but …
The monetary costs are running / owning / renting hardware … having the skill and training and knowledge to setup / run / maintain / update these systems on your own … taking the time to maintain all this on your own … and the costs only increase as your instance becomes more and more popular with more users accessing more and more content.
I will keep accessing the fediverse from an instance I’ve signed up for at lemmy.ca … and I will support them because now I am starting to realize that the only way we can keep this new form of social media free and open is if we all step up and support those who volunteer their time and effort to run these systems for us who can’t or don’t want to.
Lots of non-techie people rely on their techie friends to fix their broken wifi or crashed laptop for free and us techie friends still do it, sometimes with a grumble, but just as often with a smile. It’s great that you’re looking to compensate and support the people running these sites and I strongly encourage you to do so, the more you do the more practical and reliable the network will be. I just want you to keep it in perspective that as long as there are techie people out there who like to play with this sort of stuff in their spare time, and enjoy the feeling of “contributing”, and believe me there are lots of us, we don’t need to live in terror of all the server gods deciding one day that it’s too expensive and the whole network shuts down. There will always be lots and lots of people running small nodes and contributing far more than their fair share, and that’s okay. While they someday may not be enough to support the whole network on their own, they probably are right now and I think it’s still much too early to be alarmed about the health of the network or that there’s too much centralization on a few big servers. That will pass, and if it doesn’t, you can be sure people will keep relentlessly talking about it, because it’s important.
It’s just a protocol between servers. So no one? Who owns “English”?
Each instance can elect to federate or not federate with others.
So the question just goes down one level … who owns the instance? It’s an important question as it then determines what influence can occur with any instance or any owner or owners of an instance.
Yes, no one can own the English language but the language can only occur because each and everyone of us own the hardware because the hardware is built into our bodies.
A fediverse instance has to be run from some location and by some hardware … so the question I still wonder about is … who owns any one instance … who owns or controls Lemmy.world? who owns and controls lemmy.ca
htpps:/lemmy.world is run by <redacted> (@ruud@lemmy.world) and htpps://lemmy.ca is run by <redacted> (@smorks@lemmy.ca). That information literally took me a matter of seconds to google… there’s no conspiracy. The deal is that literally anyone can spin up a server and fire up an instance. The answer is different for every instance (usually).
Your friends are stating the obvious - pretty much everything in the world is owned by someone, whether it’s a Huffy Princess Bike or a message board server. The difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that Lemmy is open source.
If you don’t trust lemmy.world and lemmy.ca for whatever reason, it’s trivial for you to move on to another instance and continue using Lemmy on an instance that makes you feel more comfortable, and still get the Lemmy experience. Or as others have pointed out, spin up your own instance, but with blackjack and hookers, then you can defederate from whomever you wish. That’s when the fun really begins (but by “fun” I mean tremendous workloads and tons of responsibility. And financial costs :p)
