The sistem is run by a miriad of different servers that are own each by its community, you would have to research more deeply the specific server you want to know the owner of
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.
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?
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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.
So from my understanding at least for kbin is that the software is open source and for kbin.social, ernest is paying for the server to run this instance and he is planning to get someone to help with the server while he works on the administration side. There are other instances run by other people and all the magazines seem to be backed up in one way or another in each instance so that if this instance dies, there is some parity? Not 100% sure on this last part so correct me if im wrong...
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I have a personal Lemmy instance, and a personal Calckey instance. Still debating on creating a personal PixelFed instance, and maybe even a public kbin instance.
Anyone who wants to host a fediverse website owns the fediverse. It belongs to any of us and all of us.
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No one.
There are people who develop the software for different instances, but they don't implement it so they don't have control over what gets done with their software.
Different admins have control over their own servers, but they don't have control over other people's servers. This has already come up as one server defederated (dropped their connection with) other servers temporarily due to spam issues.
Mods control their own communities, but under the greater control of the admins for that server.
It is kind of like email or the world wide web. No one owns either of those.