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?
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.