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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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] 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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