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?
Your concerns are valid but the whole point of fediverse is so that anyone can host their own instances, as with the users are encouraged to sign up different instances instead of a central one so will the cost never be as astronomical as something like Youtube or Reddit and there will not be a catastrophic loss even if a major instance does go down. While I agree admins should be allowed to have donations accepted, I don’t think admins should treat this as a business at the first place.
TL;DR: For a not so huge volume instance, the cost isn’t as high as people would think, I believe the community can sustain itself.
It’s hard to accept anything is ‘free’ these days. “If it’s free, you’re the product”, comes to mind. It’s not ad revenue clearly (yet). Are we giving info to data brokers? Someone somewhere has to be making money off this.
I don’t particularly care that I’m being exploited for revenue, but I do like to know how the exploitation is happening.
It’s a very sad commentary on the world we live in that we can’t just have something nice as a community without someone trying to make a buck, but it’s certainly what we’re used to.