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?
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.