Lemmy.ca's Main Community

@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?

"you mean to tell me that different entities can communicate with each others without a ceo ? Preposterous !"

It's just a protocol between servers. So no one? Who owns "English"?

Each instance can elect to federate or not federate with others.

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.

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"

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 ✌

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.

I own some of it.

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.

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 @[email protected] and @[email protected].

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.

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.

its a cabal made up of the communists, GE, the catholic church, Saudi Aramco, and the royal family.

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 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.

There is no single entity.

There is your instance admin who runs your single instance but you can simply go find another one and then subscribe to everything you want again.

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.