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?
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?
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.
Yep, figured that out, thanks. :)
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.
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.
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.