Trying to wrap my head around the fediverse. Is each instance like another person with a server? Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?
Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?
Sorry I’m sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense! I love the idea of the fediverse as I understand it, but I like to dig into these details.
Individual person, group of people, nonprofit, company, governments, political parties, whatever. Anything goes.
Yes. That’s why it’s advisable to join one with a dedicated group of committed individuals, or run your own. Joining super small servers might sound nice, but the owners might just ditch it.
There are some run by companies, yes, for example social.bbc which is run by the British Broadcasting Corporation. gruene.social is run by the Greens (political party) in Germany, and social.overheid.nl is operated by the Dutch government.
There will probably be some company-run instances that don’t allow user signup, since all they do is feredate with everyone and exfiltrate data. It’s what people do…
What do you mean by the company-run instances? Like for internal communication?
No, I mean companies that have only one objective - gather user data. Advertisers, marketing agencies, AI language models, corporates. If they federate with other instances, they essentially copy all posts and messages (including private messages!) over to their own server, and can then run it through data analytics software for whatever use case they have, try to match your user profile to other advertiser profiles they already have on you, etc.
And there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s simply how a decentralized network works. Every node in the system can see all the data and use it as they see fit.
It’s also how the internet works, and you wouldn’t need to set up an instance to scrape the data from lemmy.
True, what I mean is that federation removes the need for scraping since the data is delivered to you in its purest form.
Yeah API access is more efficient for the host than delivering the human-viewable content. Hence why Twitter and others always used to have their API open, so they could minimise the load from scraping.