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?
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.
Yes, it’s literally just like that. You have to announce to the fediverse you’re open to federate with them and then they have the ability to defederate whenever they want.
The way I’ve seen this work previously on fedi is that people post “hey I made a new server, please boost for reach”. That effectively announces the existence of the server to the network. It can be difficult to get noticed at first, if you are a single-user instance without many followers.
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.
There literally isn’t. New servers do not automatically federate with each other. Someone on the new server needs to manually start following users or groups on existing servers just to to establish any kind of connection. And even then, people on the existing server won’t know that any users or groups exist on the new one.
It takes conscious effort by users to create connections and start content flowing between fediverse websites. There’s no central authority of any kind. If someone doesn’t make those connections, a fediverse website is functionally a stand-alone social media website.
