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.
Theoretically there is community input but at the end of the day, one guy owns it and can do stuff unilaterally. There is occasionally drama over that, like recently the piracy community was removed due to concern over possible legal hassles. I’d say Lemmy world tries to be friendly and mainstream, while edgier stuff tends to live on other instances. So you can still find what you want.
Nothing stops you from using multiple instances of course. It’s no different from drinking at more than one café. But people tend to have a main one that they visit the most.
To be clear, lemmy.dbzer0.com wasn’t removed, it was defederated by lemmy.world. That only affects lemmy.world, it’s still federated with other instances.
So by defederated, that means since I have a lemmy.world account, I can’t subscribe to the piracy community? But if I made another account on a different instance I could?
Yes, exactly. For example, I can still see the main Piracy community at dbzer0 with https://lemm.ee/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, however if you try to go to the lemmy.world version at https://lemmy.world/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com it turns up an error.