@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?
Yes it shows 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?
It's just a protocol between servers. So no one? Who owns "English"?
Each instance can elect to federate or not federate with others.
"you mean to tell me that different entities can communicate with each others without a ceo ? Preposterous !"
I own some of it.
Aha! .... I found an owner!
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"
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.
You really need to seperate the development of Lemmy from administrating a Lemmy instance. The political views of the devs don't matter at all. You don't support these by using Lemmy.
So there are kinda 3 answers to your question:
Who owns Lemmy? Nobody; it's FOSS
Who owns Lemmy.ca? Smorks
Who owns activitypub protocol? The world wide web consortium created it I believe, but it's an open standard and will likely evolve based on which organizations use it. In the same way as how HTML and HTTP have evolved over time alongside the growth of some of the largest applications that use those standards.
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.
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.
Just joined, still getting used to this. I joined lemmy.ca because people were asking to pick an instance other than the overloaded lemmy.ml and I'm Canadian. This instance seems nice, but it's a little too...Canadian, y'know? I like seeing global news in my feed, not mostly Canadian news. I guess I'll switch from the default Local view to Subscribed and keep subscribing to communities that I enjoy.
If I decide I want to switch to another instance, is there a way to import my data from this account? Or do I have to start fresh?
Hardware: I personally own/operate my own instance, so I own the hardware. In case of just signing up for random instances, they own/operate the hardware or rent the hardware. This does bring up a lot of possibilities, so if you are concerned about such things consider running one for yourself/friends.
Software: The software is open source under the AGPL license, so it's free to use. It is copyright the original author(s) or organization that wrote it, who control which license is used.
Protocol: The protocol specification is ActivityPub which is separate of fediverse projects and a W3C specification. This means it's as safe as HTTP or other common web protocols in terms of ownership.
As for censorship, each instance can choose to block other instances they deem are inappropriate. So the system relies on each community making decisions about what is acceptable and isn't acceptable. There will be servers that have more fringe content, and these will likely have the least number of federated instances due to other users not wanting to participate in this content.
Ideally, the users of each instance will agree with the policies that instance has. If not, they can move to another instance that more closely aligns with their preferences. It's also important to respect the policies of other instances, as they are choosing to allow instances to communicate with their user base. If they see an instance as a threat to their instance, it's only natural to take action. Where this line is drawn is based on the instance admin and by extension the instance users. This will lead to a less connected network as a whole, but allows groups to exist without fear of being removed for their personal preferences. This is of course ignoring legal requirements, which will be a concern for most instance operators.
As for politics, large politically active groups will most likely have many instances that align with their politics. Once things get political, they can get murky fairly quick. Any instance admin could push their politics onto the instance, it's up to the users to decide if that is ok or not. The only way this would lead to censorship/control is in the case of centralization, where a small group of entities (or single entity) run the largest instances. This is the reason the fediverse is pushing back against Meta trying to join the fediverse in my opinion. It's up to the user base to strive for a decentralized system, and all the tools to do so are public and free (as in speech, it does have an economic cost). It's easier to just "join an instance", but with convenience comes a cost.
As I mentioned in my other replies on this thread ... I think it is important for anyone of us to know who the owners and operators are of the instance we use. It not only protects us users but it also keeps those owners and operators accountable to what they created and maintain.
The logic works the other way too ... users should understand that these services require funds and money in order to operate ... we can't just expect tech specialists and hobbyists and technology enthusiasts to just work for free .. they have to pay for hardware, they have to pay for rentals, they have to pay for services and most importantly they should be paid something for all their time, effort and expertise.
Nothing comes for free ... and when we take for granted all these free services and free work that are being done by anonymous people, eventually they will get tired of working so hard and they will drift towards a position of looking for money and in seeing monetary value to all the work they created, and then sell it to a corporation that can take advantage of it.
Which is why I find it important to know who the owners of my instance is ... and if I like them, I may want to send some funds their way to help support the work they do.
Whoever is running the instance.
Lemmy, kbin, and mastodon all use activitypub to share content between instances. Each instance is run by a different person or group than the others.
The hardware depends, but usually is owned by a hosting company (cloud) or an independent operator.
The software is open source and isn't really owned by anyone.
Admins are whoever the server owner determines. I'm not sure how moderators are defined on Lemmy, though likely dealt with on a per-community basis.
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.
its a cabal made up of the communists, GE, the catholic church, Saudi Aramco, and the royal family.
Your friends sound like they don't know what free open source software is, or that anyone can launch a lemmy server of their own. Think of Reddit roughly like visiting a cafe, but they can change the hours and duration you stay with your friends, and how much your coffee costs. compared to Lemmy being you meet all your friends in a public park that is open 24/7 and they can invite others and nobody has a say who joins, determines the stay. But random strangers bring coffee because they want to share.
I feel like people are missing the question that is really being asked here.
The way I read the question is "How are the individual federated servers able to interact?"
I mean, there has to be some sort of system somewhere that helps the servers connect to each other. How does Lemmy.ca know that Lemmy.world exists? There must be some sort of authority that knows. There must be some sort of first step when a new instance appears that lets everyone know that the new server exists.
Unless it's like routers and routing tables but that only works because of the physical structure allowing it, a federated server isn't going to reach out to its nearest neighbor and see another federated server. When you start a new server, do you have to like... pick an existing federated server to... like... knock on the door of? Give them a pie and tell them that you're in the neighborhood now?
I don't know the answer to this question... But I like the pie idea.
Your knock on the door analogy is exactly right--when I started my instance, I had to search every community that I wanted to see directly by URL. Then my server would send a message to that community's server saying that I subscribed to that community. Now, every time a post is made at that community, it's server sends my server an update. If I post a comment to a community on lemmy.ca (like I am now), from my kbin instance (remy.city), and you are reading it from kbin.social, that means my server first saved my comment locally, then sent it to lemmy.ca, and lemmy.ca sent it to your kbin.social because you subscribed to the community. So in that case, lemmy.ca is the 'authority', and is responsible for sending updates out to subscribed parties.
There is no such thing for instances--each new instance has to manually make a connection to another (i.e. a user on the new instance must subscribe to something from another instance). I think the tools like fediverse.observer are reading comments or other activity from popular instances, and are then compiling a list of the instances they find by doing that. But there is no central server/authority that makes communication between instances possible. Each instance has to talk to each other instance for it to happen. It's a bit inefficient but is necessary for decentralized communication.
I mean, there has to be some sort of system somewhere that helps the servers connect to each other. How does Lemmy.ca know that Lemmy.world exists? There must be some sort of authority that knows. There must be some sort of first step when a new instance appears that lets everyone know that the new server exists.
There literally isn't. New servers do not automatically federate with each other. Someone on the new server needs to manually start following users or groups on existing servers just to to establish any kind of connection. And even then, people on the existing server won't know that any users or groups exist on the new one.
It takes conscious effort by users to create connections and start content flowing between fediverse websites. There's no central authority of any kind. If someone doesn't make those connections, a fediverse website is functionally a stand-alone social media website.
Yes, it's literally just like that. You have to announce to the fediverse you're open to federate with them and then they have the ability to defederate whenever they want.
Lemmy and Kbin are just open-source software that can be run on servers. To answer your question, in short, the community has the most influence over the fediverse.
I haven’t yet, but eventually I plan to host my own and just sub to other instances from there, specifically because I trust myself more than other mods. And I think that’s a big goal of federation—if you want, you can just* run your own instance and you shouldn’t miss out on anything because of it.
*It can still be quite difficult to set up instances, depending on what software you want to use. I hope this will improve dramatically over the next year or two, so non-IT-professionals can participate in the network.
Welcome to lemmy.ca's c/main!
Since everyone on lemmy.ca gets subscribed here, this is the place to chat about the goings on at lemmy.ca, support-type items, suggestions, etc.
Announcements can be found at https://lemmy.ca/c/meta
For support related to this instance, use https://lemmy.ca/c/lemmy_ca_support