this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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That's one of the important questions that concerned me ... who owns the instance I am on. I can appreciate that these systems are all independent of one another and the whole is not controlled by anyone entity or person. But I would like to know who the owner of the instance I am on.
Maybe that should be an important feature to share with everyone up front when you subscribe or sign on to any instance ... a description of who the owners and controllers of the instance are ... who are they, are they just one person? a group? who are they? where are they from?
I understand we have to be private on the internet but if you want to promote being an open and shared universe of users ... one of the most important pieces of information for me is in knowing who pays to run the service I am using for free.
On the flip side of that ... if I know who the owners of the instance are .. and I like them .. then I would be more than willing to send donations or a subscription to help them pay for the services I use.
In your case, lemmy.ca says this about the instance you are on.
That gives a fair amount of information about what is and is not acceptable on that particular instance. Looking at your local communities only should tell you a lot about the general character of the group, I don't use Lemmy (this is from kbin, hi) but it seems like your UI has multiple buttons to show all/subscribed/local feeds, so switch it to local and see if it pisses you off.
Telling who owns it is harder, I think that's often somewhat obscured for dox/harassment reasons. However, in this case the website shows at the bottom of the right-side column who the admins are:
And now I see that @smorks noticed your post and hopefully that will clear things up ;-) Hopefully they don't mind being doxxxxxxed.
I get that people need their privacy ... I don't need to know the intimate details of a person's life in order to get a sense of who they are
My biggest concerns are towards money .... how they make it, how they spent it, what are their costs and are they making or losing money?
Everyone keeps saying just run your own instance ... great .. that could work for a very small group of people but it would still take plenty of energy, time and money to maintain that little instance among friends .... imagine what the costs end up becoming if you run an instance very well and gain lots of popularity? The costs quickly add up.
Then the concern becomes, how does the instance owner pay for all this? And will they continue to run a loss or did they gain a way to generate profit? or most worryingly will they ever try to monetize their instance and sell it to the highest bidder?
You can run your own instance and not allow anyone else to sign up, though I do agree the effort it requires if it's just for a single person is a lot. Spread out amongst friends, or other folks who don't mind chipping in, makes it seem a bit more sensible. But there is always the option to turn off registrations, and on Lemmy at least you can make registrations require approval.
The only other way your instance could incur more running costs than you'd like is if you have a community on your instance that gets very popular, and folks from all instances start posting to it (think stuff on Beehaw, Lemmy.world, etc.) Then your server needs to be the man in the middle, facilitating communication between users of other communities. But you always have the option of not allowing communities to be created, or stopping federation altogether if it gets to be too much. There really isn't a way it would suddenly cost you more money than you thought, unless you aren't monitoring it enough (which isn't much more than setting up notification emails for storage use, system crashes, etc).
Running your own instance is the only way to really be sure that the costs are being covered on the up-and-up. Otherwise you're just taking folks at their word. Your data, in the end, could always be sold to anyone. It is publically available through the ActivityPub protocol, after all. But that also means there's really no need to pay for it, so no one would buy it.
No, absolutely do not run your own instance, that's absurd. That's like saying you shouldn't bother using email if you don't host your own server.
Your concerns make sense, they have complete access to anything you post and I can't imagine that any sort of messages are encrypted. That's just true. They could theoretically take your posts and sell them for profit, though anyone can already do that by simply federating with your server.
Anyway.
There's a limit. Just assume anything you post is not private for sure. I don't know if you can edit things, but I'd be shocked if it were impossible for an admin to. Maybe I'm wrong, they're such early software...
The good news is that in theory you should be able to migrate your entire account from the one you are on to a new one if you don't like the policy. Maybe? Not sure if that works yet.
But no, do not roll your own instance, that is silly and ruins discovery. At the same time be aware that the one you are on is ultimately owned by someone with the root password.
It's not doable yet, but as far as I know it's something that's being worked on
Internet hosting isn't actually that insanely expensive. I suspect that it isn't a massive system for most except the bigger instances. Donations is so far the only way instances get money afaik, whether directly or through Patreon.
The best way to know who owns the service you use it to own it yourself. That does come with a lot of overhead, though. I started my own kbin instance because I, like you, was worried about "what if one day I go to login and my home instance decided to shut off forever?" That can't happen now, besides if I forget to pay/something goes wrong with the server. But I enjoy tinkering so it works out in my case.
I think ultimately users are responsible for which instance they choose to sign up for. If there isn't much transparency on a certain instance, it may not be the one for you. I agree that the sign up pages could have some areas where more information could be shared. Of course, it is up to each instance admin to share accurate and factual information as to who they are/where the money comes from/goes etc.
I see this at the bottom of the sidebar of your instance. Was there something else you were looking for other than what's there, or... did you not see that there?