this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
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Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.

The platform has 57 third party apps.

The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The "just pick an instance!" and "my instance shut down" thing is a core pain point here.

BlueSky is corporately run, and it's semi-centealized. This is bad for the internet, but it's good for the user. At least on the surface. And that's what users care about. It provides a sense of stability, and an umspoken promise that if anything happens, it's the company's fault, and the company's problem.

The fediverse is run by hobbiests. You join some hobbiest's forum or microblog, it connects to a bunch of other hobbiest's forums or microblogs, and if things break, oh well, it's just a hobby! And if that hobby becomes stressful for the hobbiest, they just abandon the hobby.

Leaving the users holding the bag.

The fediverse is unstable as an end user, because, as it's currently structured, it's not really designed to have end users. It's designed to have hobbiest tinkerers. It's right in the oft repeated motto of tne of the fediverse: users should own their data!

But who owns the data in the fediverse? Who actually controls it?

Server admins.

You own your data by self-hosting.

Like a giant computer nerd.