For a few weeks I noticed many publications as the likes of “What about the nazi and/or communist admin of this instance?”, “How can I move my account to another instance, 'cause I’m stupid, I come from Reddit, you know?”, “How do we pay for the server maintenance with so many users, should we start selling ads?”, “Should we defederate with instance X as someone there don’t like the Telletubies?”.
So many genuine questions asked in good faith. But they are all misplaced: the fediverse is not about one, or some, or all instances, it’s all about YOUR OWN INSTANCE.
It seems almost everyone here is stuck into Web 2.0, where you would log into Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, Imgur, Gmail and such, and where you would happily put all your personal data and trust. Do not do the same with lemmy-something.com or lemmy-some.what. Don’t trust anyone about anything, everyone is evil to someone, sometimes, in certain circumstances, after a certain time, after growing to a certain size.
At an age of ubiquitous connectivity, of massive storage and processing power, it’s time for everyone to host his/her own instance. Instead of putting your trust into a fucking megacorp selling your personal data and treating you like shit, instead of putting your data into a nazi/communist/LGBT/alien/what-else’s instance who can also treat you as shit, put your trust into your internet skills and your data into your own storage.
THEN you will get in control of your digital life, and then we will end these intelligent but nevertheless completely out of touch questions like above and start to ask some important ones, some you can reply alone:
- who I want to federate with ?
- who I want to ban ?
- what universe do I want to build for myself?
- can I afford to share another 12 TB of porn ?
Of course the protocols will need to improve, of course the tools are not quite here yet, of course SMTP on port 25 is silly with 99% of ISPs, of course it requires at the moment some skills with linux console and internet’s arcanes fluency. But very soon, I hope, a one click setup for a single board computer with cope with DDNS, attached storage, firewall and such.
You really need to setup your minds for this new paradigm: mostly everything about you should be self hosted. Keep your data, keep control with who you want to share your data, who you want to interact with.
Then, and only then, we will start to be able to dream of getting rid of all these megacorp who will soon federate themselves into Cyberdyne Systems. “Fuck /u/spez” is not sufficient.
Reddit wasn’t only for people who know how to set up an instance. It was for artists, for gamers, for people of all ages. If we want Lemmy to have any staying power, to have a user base that fills the hole our hearts left by Reddit, the diversity of communities and content, then we can’t expect every Skyrim Grandma and Rule 34 artist to set up their own instance.
What we really need are for the artists and the gamers and the influencers and the mathematicians and the communities of all kinds to band together, diversify skills, get at least a few trusted members with web dev skills and have the groups democratically control their own instances.
We need democratic control of the internet. Fuck authoritarian centralized websites, they’re just as bad as authoritarian governments.