2y ago

Who owns the Fediverse? I mean who owns and runs the hardware that runs this system?

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?

142 comments

@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?
- Yes it shows as edited
- This analogy should be the top comment. Fediverse services are like email services. They’re basically interchangeable. If your email service starts to suck, you get a new email address. It’s a huge pain to move all your old email, copy your contacts, set up redirections, and then change your contact info everywhere, but what’s the alternative? Are you not going to have an email address?
  If ActivityPub services become the kind of de facto standard that email did, unless you’re a server admin the instances will fade into the background noise of the internet, just like your email server has. Once we establish the standards on how a server should be maintained and moderated, it will become easier to see and ban rogue operators, just the way we do with email spammers now.
  Does anybody worry about the political leanings of their office Exchange365 administrator?
  
  Does anybody worry about the political leanings of their office Exchange365 administrator?
  Yes, I worry about whoever controls the spam filter. I check my spam folder often. I've caught many mistakes, but haven't noticed any clear political bias. Yet. But the great thing is, if I ever do, it's possible to switch. If I'm especially masochistic, I can even be the one controlling the spam filter.
  
  Ok, that explains all these different instances. But this analogy relates ActivityPub protocol to simple email protocol. Then, it should mean that all different federated services like Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin are various servers (similar to Gmail, yahoo) and have to be owned by someone who regulates them. So can you make it bit more clear!
- It doesn't show as edited.
- Next to the time (11h) I see a pencil icon that says when your post was created, and when it was modified.
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"
- It doesn't matter who the devs are because the code is open source. The beauty of the fediverse is that nobody controls it.
  
  Open source just means that they're not doing stuff behind your back that you're not unaware of like collecting your data. I don't think that means that the mods of a specific instance can't arbitrarily ban users or delete comments and fuck with communities within their instance.
- Well the main developers of lemmy and admins of lemmy.ml are communists,
  doubt, but even if yes, their are making a free and open alternative to a money grabbing closed source capitalist owned platform, make sense their political spectrum is leftist, but i also agree they need moderators other them themselves
  
  They definitely are. https://lemmy.ml/post/55143
  "While @dessalines and I are communists"
  @nutomic@lemmy.ml
  I believe the .ml domain was chosen specifically to signify Marxism-Leninism.
  Though I said this as a statement of fact, to answer the question. As a Marxist-Leninist myself I did not mean to imply anything by it.
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 the question just goes down one level .... who owns the instance? It's an important question as it then determines what influence can occur with any instance or any owner or owners of an instance.
  Yes, no one can own the English language but the language can only occur because each and everyone of us own the hardware because the hardware is built into our bodies.
  A fediverse instance has to be run from some location and by some hardware ... so the question I still wonder about is ... who owns any one instance ... who owns or controls Lemmy.world? who owns and controls lemmy.ca
  
  hello! i'm the current owner & admin of lemmy.ca.
  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?
  i don't really consider myself very policital, but I have taken those "vote compass" things just to see where I would fall, and i typically lean left. not sure exactly what you mean by easily influenced, but I would hope that I'm not. I think of myself as fairly level-headed, and probably overly analytical about things, and I typically don't try and let my emotions get involved in my decision making.
  I have to run but can answer more questions if you'd like. or i can maybe do an AMA later?
  
  htpps:/lemmy.world is run by Ruud Schilders (@ruud@lemmy.world) and htpps://lemmy.ca is run by Andy Brandt (@smorks@lemmy.ca). That information literally took me a matter of seconds to google... there's no conspiracy. The deal is that literally anyone can spin up a server and fire up an instance. The answer is different for every instance (usually).
  Your friends are stating the obvious - pretty much everything in the world is owned by someone, whether it's a Huffy Princess Bike or a message board server. The difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that Lemmy is open source.
  If you don't trust lemmy.world and lemmy.ca for whatever reason, it's trivial for you to move on to another instance and continue using Lemmy on an instance that makes you feel more comfortable, and still get the Lemmy experience. Or as others have pointed out, spin up your own instance, but with blackjack and hookers, then you can defederate from whomever you wish. That's when the fun really begins (but by "fun" I mean tremendous workloads and tons of responsibility. And financial costs :p)
  
  I think the advantage here is that the average instance size can remain small and relevant to the individual users values without sacrificing the amount of content available in one spot. The owner of lemmy.world (for now) is easier to reach out to and share concerns with. You can't go directly to Spez or to Reddit's future shareholders with a problem in the same way you could with an instance's owner. It's the (im)perfect blend of old school bb forums and the mega platforms.
  The biggest issue with the fediverese is the non-transferable nature of your profile. If that can be resolved, I'm all in. Afaik that is a planned feature for Lemmy in particular.
  
  Anyone can run one. Why not run one yourself for $20/month?
  
  I don’t own this instance. But I run my own. I do so that I can control my access and am in control of my destiny. I have been going back and forth, pretty heavily, about opening it up come July.
  I have worked in IT infrastructure/operations for years so I know the responsibilities, hence the hesitation because if I do allow others on it, it ups the stakes a bit.
  Personally I know the costs. I am willing to accept them, and do not have any interest in increasing them to accommodate more than my instance can handle. Nor do I have much interest in policing and moderating people or communities. So if I opened my instance it would be solely so others can federate and join witb other instances. Drama someone caused would be dealt with my removing the drama.
"you mean to tell me that different entities can communicate with each others without a ceo ? Preposterous !"
I own some of it.
- Aha! .... I found an owner!
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.
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 ✌
- Running your own instance seems to be a common answer here ... that is probably correct but most of us do not have the time, the resources or the skill to do such things ... which is why we rely on others to run the instances and hope that they are accountable enough to the people they have allowed onto their instance.
  Bottom line is ... whoever is running the instance ... yes the software is open and available ... the services are open and available .... but ...
  The monetary costs are running / owning / renting hardware ... having the skill and training and knowledge to setup / run / maintain / update these systems on your own ... taking the time to maintain all this on your own .... and the costs only increase as your instance becomes more and more popular with more users accessing more and more content.
  I will keep accessing the fediverse from an instance I've signed up for at lemmy.ca ... and I will support them because now I am starting to realize that the only way we can keep this new form of social media free and open is if we all step up and support those who volunteer their time and effort to run these systems for us who can't or don't want to.
  
  Lots of non-techie people rely on their techie friends to fix their broken wifi or crashed laptop for free and us techie friends still do it, sometimes with a grumble, but just as often with a smile. It's great that you're looking to compensate and support the people running these sites and I strongly encourage you to do so, the more you do the more practical and reliable the network will be. I just want you to keep it in perspective that as long as there are techie people out there who like to play with this sort of stuff in their spare time, and enjoy the feeling of "contributing", and believe me there are lots of us, we don't need to live in terror of all the server gods deciding one day that it's too expensive and the whole network shuts down. There will always be lots and lots of people running small nodes and contributing far more than their fair share, and that's okay. While they someday may not be enough to support the whole network on their own, they probably are right now and I think it's still much too early to be alarmed about the health of the network or that there's too much centralization on a few big servers. That will pass, and if it doesn't, you can be sure people will keep relentlessly talking about it, because it's important.
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 @dessalines@lemmy.ml and @nutomic@lemmy.ml.
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.
- Just joined, still getting used to this. I joined lemmy.ca because people were asking to pick an instance other than the overloaded lemmy.ml and I'm Canadian. This instance seems nice, but it's a little too...Canadian, y'know? I like seeing global news in my feed, not mostly Canadian news. I guess I'll switch from the default Local view to Subscribed and keep subscribing to communities that I enjoy.
  If I decide I want to switch to another instance, is there a way to import my data from this account? Or do I have to start fresh?
  
  I like seeing global news in my feed, not mostly Canadian news.
  Did you know that you can subscribe to whatever communities you like, even if they're hosted on other instances? They will show up in your "Subscribed" feed, which you can choose in your user settings as the default view.
  In other words, you can have a non-Canadian feed regardless of whether lemmy.ca is your home instance.
  
  Currently there's not. I think Lemmy devs are looking into implementing that, but there's a whole lot of other work to be done.
  IMO, I don't think that my account is really that valuable on one instance or another, so I'm perfectly fine just deleting or leaving another account elsewhere as I move on. Comment history, I guess, can be nice? But it's also sorta invasive having other people poke through that. And there's no overall account scores on Lemmy, so there's not any hard-earned numbers I'd wanna keep.
  
  Unfortunately your user is not currently portable. You may also find that you end up with multiple accounts due to certain aspects of federation and a desire to engage elsewhere.
  Moving entirely you could post a reference to the new one in your profile. That's about it at the moment.
  
  I use "Subscribed" and "Top - Day" the most, and it would be kind of nice for that preference to be "remembered". I know several Lemmy clients for Android and iPhone are under development, and I expect that behavior will be common. Jerboa seems to default to Local/Hot whenever you hit Home. Might be configurable though.
  In the meantime, there's an RSS feature, and I just use "Subscribed/Top-Day" for my default page.
  Point being, this will likely be a common complaint. Even Beehaw.org and Lemmy.world are just a fraction of the Lemmy-verse, so every instance will only ever be a small subset of what's going on. Personally, the Local tab is useful for keeping up on the health and development of your local instance, but I really only scan the local feed once a day or so.
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.
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.
- As I mentioned in my other replies on this thread ... I think it is important for anyone of us to know who the owners and operators are of the instance we use. It not only protects us users but it also keeps those owners and operators accountable to what they created and maintain.
  The logic works the other way too ... users should understand that these services require funds and money in order to operate ... we can't just expect tech specialists and hobbyists and technology enthusiasts to just work for free .. they have to pay for hardware, they have to pay for rentals, they have to pay for services and most importantly they should be paid something for all their time, effort and expertise.
  Nothing comes for free ... and when we take for granted all these free services and free work that are being done by anonymous people, eventually they will get tired of working so hard and they will drift towards a position of looking for money and in seeing monetary value to all the work they created, and then sell it to a corporation that can take advantage of it.
  Which is why I find it important to know who the owners of my instance is ... and if I like them, I may want to send some funds their way to help support the work they do.
- Perfect answer 👍
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.
- It had hard coded censorship. It got removed because it ran into the Scunthorpe problem and also was blocking certain nonenglish words that were slurs in english. I believe now there's a configurable file you can set for your own filter now.
  
  Scunthorpe problem, if anyone else is wondering.
  
  Tom Scott did a video on that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE
its a cabal made up of the communists, GE, the catholic church, Saudi Aramco, and the royal family.
- I guess we're keeping the Imperial System then?
- And @kichae !
  https://kbin.social/m/main@lemmy.ca/t/71719/-/comment/308100
  And @jerkface too!
  https://lemmy.ca/comment/489423
  Keep pulling that string we've almost got them!
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 knock on the door analogy is exactly right--when I started my instance, I had to search every community that I wanted to see directly by URL. Then my server would send a message to that community's server saying that I subscribed to that community. Now, every time a post is made at that community, it's server sends my server an update. If I post a comment to a community on lemmy.ca (like I am now), from my kbin instance (remy.city), and you are reading it from kbin.social, that means my server first saved my comment locally, then sent it to lemmy.ca, and lemmy.ca sent it to your kbin.social because you subscribed to the community. So in that case, lemmy.ca is the 'authority', and is responsible for sending updates out to subscribed parties.
  There is no such thing for instances--each new instance has to manually make a connection to another (i.e. a user on the new instance must subscribe to something from another instance). I think the tools like fediverse.observer are reading comments or other activity from popular instances, and are then compiling a list of the instances they find by doing that. But there is no central server/authority that makes communication between instances possible. Each instance has to talk to each other instance for it to happen. It's a bit inefficient but is necessary for decentralized communication.
- 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.
- 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.
- Think of it like email vs a website. Microsoft.com isn't connected to Yahoo.com, but they store email originating from both places. The difference here is those emails are email lists (posts and comments from subscribed communities) and get sent automatically once they learn each other exist (because a user asked to get an email).
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.
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 don't have a problem with the software ... I know it is open source and made available - its the main reason why I went onto Lemmy and Kbin
  I'm not so concerned with the software .... its the costs of running these services that end up becoming an issue with users, instance owners and admins ... running services takes money, renting servers takes money, bandwidth takes money, having people run, operate and maintain these services is unpaid labour
  I like using these things for free like anyone else ... but I think our community should build a culture of encouraging people to subscribe, pay or donate to instance owners, software developers, open source software in order to help the people that maintain these things and keep these services, software and projects out of corporate hands.
  If we let them all suffer without funding ... the owners will eventually look for ways to make money on their own ... and depending on who these people are and how desperate they can become with rising costs ... Lemmy, Kbin, Mastadon could all grow to become the next corporate owned Reddit all over again
  
  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 almost feels like it should use tax money to be up and running you know ? Like the government take a tax on everyone and they use this money to help the community run their infrastructure.
  Let's use the people's money to build a good social network!
  
  But Lemmy and Kbin can't just "go corporate" because there is no Lemmy LLC with a CEO and shareholders. Lemmy is open source software that a whole bunch of people have been contributing to (although admittedly, I have no idea who's in charge of approving changes, or how that works). But one thing that MIGHT be true (I'm still figuring this out myself) is that if you and I are excellent coders and we know that lemmy 3.0 is nothing but a corporate cash grab, we can just go back to Lemmy 2.99, and Save As... call it Jemmy, and then anybody who follows us is part of our cool new anti-corporate club.
  I think, maybe. I'm not actually sure at all.
  The biggest corporatization risk I see is that if one instance, like lemmy.jrubal gets SO big and awesome and concentrated that it would be really painful to leave and start over, then whoever operates lemmy.jrubal would have the leverage they need to be greedy, until they make it painful enough that people leave.
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...
- I looked around and found a donation page for Ernest and kbin.social at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
  
  Yep. I know it's not literal coffee but I love thinking of Ernest as this incredibly wired guy who is mainlining coffee from us as he works on kbin.
  
  Thanks for the link! Coffee and kudos passed along.
  
  Yah i saw that and will be donating too. Servers arent cheap unfortunately and it would suck if he had to pay for it all out of pocket...
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
- 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.
  
  In your case, lemmy.ca says this about the instance you are on.
  Lemmy.ca
  A canadian-run community, geared towards canadians, but all are welcome!
  Welcome to Lemmy.ca!
  “Lemmy.ca” is so named due to it running the Lemmy software, in the Fediverse, and it’s geared toward Canadians, hosted in Canada, and run by a Canadian. It is, however, not at all restricted to Canadians, or Canadian culture/topics/etc. All are welcome!
  We have some rules here:
  
  No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. No porn. No Ads / Spamming.
  That gives a fair amount of information about what is and is not acceptable on that particular instance. Looking at your local communities only should tell you a lot about the general character of the group, I don't use Lemmy (this is from kbin, hi) but it seems like your UI has multiple buttons to show all/subscribed/local feeds, so switch it to local and see if it pisses you off.
  Telling who owns it is harder, I think that's often somewhat obscured for dox/harassment reasons. However, in this case the website shows at the bottom of the right-side column who the admins are:
  admins: @smorks @crb
  And now I see that @smorks noticed your post and hopefully that will clear things up ;-) Hopefully they don't mind being doxxxxxxed.
  
  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?
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.
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.
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.
- Out of curiosity, what do you mean by personal instance? Only you use it? I'm wondering what reasons someone would have a personal instance. Or maybe like a group for friends only?
  
  My Lemmy instance acts as a private forum for people I've met through a local recreational sports league. I use it to remind people of games and social events.
  My Calckey server is just me. I set it up because I wanted to know how to do it, and now I'm my own admin and moderator. It's a good time.
  If you look in the aftermath of the Beehaw defederation, you'll see a bunch of people whining about "rogue admins". One option for those folks is to just be their own.
  
  I’m wondering what reasons someone would have a personal instance.
  There's a variety of reasons for this depending on the person, but common ones I've read are along the lines of curiosity & enjoying experimenting with the software, easier to back up their own data, having full control over their instance & so not having to keep up with whether your admins have defederated from another instance while you were away, and so on.

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