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Trying to wrap my head around the fediverse. Is each instance like another person with a server? Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?

Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?

Sorry I'm sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense! I love the idea of the fediverse as I understand it, but I like to dig into these details.

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[-] Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The strength of the fediverse is that it's a whole network of individually owned servers. The weakness of the fediverse is that it's a whole network of individually ownwed servers.

it's a strength because you don't rely on large companies and are closer from the internet as it was designed with a decentralized network of equal importances server rather than a few big one. Which limits the power of the people owning the server and let having diverse moderation policies (e.g. I am all in letting a space for far righter mocking left-winter on Lemmygrad, but I am glad my instance doesn't federate with them)

It's a weakness, because the person running the instance may-close it tomorrow, many instance relies on someone spare ressources in time/infrastructure/money, some would accept donations,some are run by larger non profit (which also rely on donation, but have a legal structure to take them). It also means that they don't have the legal ressource to know the exact limit between legal and illegal leading to critic about their moderation closing community about topic like piracy Thread

the cool thing is that even if an instance closes, migration is fairly easy, so the impact is limited. It can be frustrating, I remember the closing of a large forum where I was involved in the large 00's which was quite frustrating for contributors (It was like a server crash followed by a corrupted backup, shit happens)

Note also that proprietary social media do close too, remember when google closed plus or wave ? or when yahoo close yahoogroups ? it's not like being owned by a large company means it'll be open forever (look at US trying to ban tik tok)

[-] sanguinepar@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

Ah Plus... I liked Plus.

If only Google had made it available to more people sooner rather than having that dumb invite system.

I genuinely think they could have wiped FB out. Whether Google are any better is another question of course.

[-] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 2 points 6 months ago

Google could have also made a competent messaging service to compete with iMessage but just... Didn't until like 2019

[-] whoreticulture@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

I actually used google's chat to talk with my family for a while, like 2010s I think. Everyone thought it was weird though, I only used it because my parents did ๐Ÿ˜‚

this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
114 points (93.8% liked)

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