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Who owns the Fediverse? I mean who owns and runs the hardware that runs this system? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

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.