Comment on Who owns the servers for Lemmy?
solrize@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Users are like coffee drinkers and servers are like decentralized coffee shops. Anyone can open a coffee shop and many do. It’s harder and more expensive than simply drinking coffee, but not that bad in the scheme of things, and within reach of average hobbyists with time on their hands and a few bucks to spend.
If the instance stays small, it’s cheap to run. If it gets popular you can ask users for donations and volunteer help. Lemmy.world is the current biggest, and stays afloat that way.
Right now there’s not much corporate presence, but that may change soon, unfortunately.
whoreticulture@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Nice analogy, thanks. Good to know Lemmy.world is donation run. Are decisions about the instance made by a collective body?
solrize@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Theoretically there is community input but at the end of the day, one guy owns it and can do stuff unilaterally. There is occasionally drama over that, like recently the piracy community was removed due to concern over possible legal hassles. I’d say Lemmy world tries to be friendly and mainstream, while edgier stuff tends to live on other instances. So you can still find what you want.
Nothing stops you from using multiple instances of course. It’s no different from drinking at more than one café. But people tend to have a main one that they visit the most.
TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 month ago
To be clear, lemmy.dbzer0.com wasn’t removed, it was defederated by lemmy.world. That only affects lemmy.world, it’s still federated with other instances.
whoreticulture@lemmy.world 1 month ago
So by defederated, that means since I have a lemmy.world account, I can’t subscribe to the piracy community? But if I made another account on a different instance I could?