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, absolutely do not run your own instance, that’s absurd. That’s like saying you shouldn’t bother using email if you don’t host your own server.
Your concerns make sense, they have complete access to anything you post and I can’t imagine that any sort of messages are encrypted. That’s just true. They could theoretically take your posts and sell them for profit, though anyone can already do that by simply federating with your server.
Anyway.
There’s a limit. Just assume anything you post is not private for sure. I don’t know if you can edit things, but I’d be shocked if it were impossible for an admin to. Maybe I’m wrong, they’re such early software…
The good news is that in theory you should be able to migrate your entire account from the one you are on to a new one if you don’t like the policy. Maybe? Not sure if that works yet.
But no, do not roll your own instance, that is silly and ruins discovery. At the same time be aware that the one you are on is ultimately owned by someone with the root password.
It’s not doable yet, but as far as I know it’s something that’s being worked on