They only have control in the sense that they can shut down the website, but the content itself isn’t in their control. It would also be possible to have the hosting under a decentralized entity controlled democratically by the people providing the hosting space (à la DAO/DAC in crypto).
I just feel like the whole problem the fediverse is trying to solve is admins slowly selling out and then having to move somewhere else. Having one website still has that problem of switching costs if you want to go somewhere else, you lose access to everything in that sphere of content. If the sh.itjust.works admins go crazy and start moderating in a way you don’t like, you can go sign up on another instance and not lose any of the communities or people you used on your former instance.
But you still rely on the admins of your new instead to decide what content you have access to and on the admins of others instances for the same thing. What I’m saying is that the admins shouldn’t have that kind of power. Heck, the website issue could be solved by having a disconnection between the front and back end.
Decentralize the hosting and make the data available to all (this way all hosts have some of the data but not all of it and you can have all data backed up by other hosts so no host can just nuke part of the website) this way anyone is able to create a frontend. So sh.itjust.works would just show me all of Lemmy’s content in the way the dev decided would be best (the UI would be of their choosing), but I would be the one deciding which communities and users I’m blocking. If I decide I don’t like how my chosen frontend works anymore I could just go and log in to another frontend using the same credentials because the data isn’t hosted on the frontend’s servers.
They only have control in the sense that they can shut down the website, but the content itself isn’t in their control. It would also be possible to have the hosting under a decentralized entity controlled democratically by the people providing the hosting space (à la DAO/DAC in crypto).
I just feel like the whole problem the fediverse is trying to solve is admins slowly selling out and then having to move somewhere else. Having one website still has that problem of switching costs if you want to go somewhere else, you lose access to everything in that sphere of content. If the sh.itjust.works admins go crazy and start moderating in a way you don’t like, you can go sign up on another instance and not lose any of the communities or people you used on your former instance.
But you still rely on the admins of your new instead to decide what content you have access to and on the admins of others instances for the same thing. What I’m saying is that the admins shouldn’t have that kind of power. Heck, the website issue could be solved by having a disconnection between the front and back end.
Decentralize the hosting and make the data available to all (this way all hosts have some of the data but not all of it and you can have all data backed up by other hosts so no host can just nuke part of the website) this way anyone is able to create a frontend. So sh.itjust.works would just show me all of Lemmy’s content in the way the dev decided would be best (the UI would be of their choosing), but I would be the one deciding which communities and users I’m blocking. If I decide I don’t like how my chosen frontend works anymore I could just go and log in to another frontend using the same credentials because the data isn’t hosted on the frontend’s servers.
No admins, just community moderators.