this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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You can't "buy" Lemmy or Mastodon any more than you can buy email or World Wide Web
Isn't Mastadon run by an organization started by Eugen Rochko? Could this organization not be bought? Or does it not make a difference who controls Rochko's organization? Sorry to ask such basic questions - I find the Fediverse pretty confusing.
He could buy a specific mastodon instance, or a specific lemmy instance if the person running the instance decided to sell their instance. It wouldn't effect any other instance directly.
By buying the mastodon org he might be able to influence development of the mastodon software, but the software is open source and someone would just make a musk-free fork and thungs would keep moving.
Also, an overly simplistic summary of the fediverse is that instead of one reddit run by the reddit corp, anyone can run their own reddit (lemmy) instance. Each instance can talk to each other instance and access data from each other instance. So instances that talk to each other effectively function like one big combined instance.
So if Musk said to himself, "I'm going to buy Mastadon from Rochko and fill all the instances with ads!", he would be able to do that but we could always just fork and create "Mastadon 2" and then everything would be normal again? Would our content and followers and stuff follow us from Mastadon 1 to Mastadon 2? Or would it just be that the instances would have to switch from 1 to 2 and nothing would really change in terms of user experience?
The best comparison here is email. So Google created an email service and serve ads with their email. This, of course, has no effect on anyone not using Google's email service and since Google still follows the standards protocols for mail servers to talk to each other it doesn't even impact their ability to communicate with other remail servers or vice versa.
The same idea works with Mastodon and Lemmy - there isn't one centralized service that can be bought, the same way you can't buy "email" or "the web".
The absolute worst case would be Musk buying the rights to the server code and changing the license for all future versions to something closed. At which point, everyone else just forks the last open version and builds on it from there. So long as neither changes the underlying protocol this has no real effect on end users. If one of them does, then it creates a split between Muskodon and whatever the new fork is called akin to both sides defederating each other.
This makes sense, thanks for the explanation!
Mastodon is just one of the many frontends for ActivityPub, the protocol behind the whole thing. While Mastodon software indeed is written and maintained by an organization, it is nonprofit, and doesn't have any control over the actual Mastodon instances since those are basically run by enthusiasts
This makes sense, thank you. I'm becoming so aware of how little I know about software (I had to look up the term frontend).
Is this right: Mastadon is an open source frontend and ActivityPub is the open source backend. And Mastadon is kind of like a tool that people use to create instances. The instances keep all of their data on their own servers, but the servers can talk to each other so every server has access to data from every other server. So if Musk bought Mastadon, he wouldn't have control of all the individual servers' data, and if Musk bought a server, all the users who wanted to could switch to another server without losing any of their data. Does this mean that every server holds a copy of all of the data from the whole network of servers?
The instances sync data only as needed - for example, if a user on a specific instance is following someone on another instance, and that someone posts something. Fetching and storing data from the entire Fediverse would require an absolutely enormous amount of bandwidth and storage, much more than most people will ever be able to afford and maintain :) (This is also why instances often purge old cached data - to reclaim storage space that is unlikely to be taken by useful data, per the nature of minuteness of social networking, and if you ever need a deleted resource, it can just be requested and synced back up to your instance, as long as it's still available on the original one.)
As the end user, you should be aware that this synced data may, and most likely will at some point (not many instances achieve absolute 100% uptime, after all), get incomplete - especially if you're using a smaller instance. When browsing user profiles, it is generally a good idea to look up their profile on their own instance, as it is guaranteed to have all of their data.
Also note that my explanation regarding "frontends" is oversimplified and technically inaccurate: a "frontend" is the user interface part on top of the software that implements the protocol. This, basically, means that you don't have to stick with whatever UI your instance offers - there are other web and native clients that will talk to your (Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, whatever they come to support) instance, and your instance will still handle all things ActivityPub, such as fetching data from other instances to it and vice versa.