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?
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