Bill is paid by using donations through open collective and Patreon:
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
Which is confirmed in their blog post about Lemmy:
Also I started paying for the Lemmy cloud servers from the mastodon.world funds
So mastodon.world, calckey.world and lemmy.world are all run by ruud and looking at mastodon.world it states they have 3 admins in total. So 2 besides ruud. And i assume the same group is involved in all of these.
This is just what i managed to figure out before joining lemmy.
Also [email protected] might be a good follow.
That begs the question, does admin has access all of our data? If he wants, can he sell the data to some big corporation?
The answer is always yes for hosted services. The data has to be stored somewhere, and it is readable if not explicitly encrypted on your device before being send to the server. Some things like passwords are usually handled differently though, they are not readable by anyone.
That’s one of the reasons why picking an instance is a big deal. You trust that instance with moderation and handling of your data. If you’re not comfortable with any instance then you should look into hosting your own!
That begs the question, does admin has access all of our data?
Yes, of course… The data is on his server, he has access to his own server and everything that’s on it. This is true for any online service whatsoever, the only exception would be encrypted data.
If he wants, can he sell the data to some big corporation?
Not legally, unless the privacy policy is changed.
I don’t want to be that guy but does this guy have a good track record? Kind of feel he managed to get a good Lemmy domain (generic sounding one) and now he has the biggest instance.
Do we know he’s a jolly good fellow?
I’m not too worried about it, because:
• He’s been running a fairly large Mastodon instance too, and it seems like it’s been going well.
• If I end up disappointed, the beauty of the fediverse is that I can up and leave. In fact, I already did: I started with an account on Beehaw, and I moved to Lemmy.world when they defederated a few instances whose contents I was interested in. It was a fairly painless move.
So for now I’m donating $5/month, and we’ll see what happens from here.
And when very disappointed, nobody stops users from starting their own instance and federate from there.
Here are the key factors I see behind Lemmy.world’s success:
- Lemmy.ml was buckling under load, and at least one of the admins (and Lemmy developer) is an unapologetic communist & China sympathizer.
- Beehaw.org is a classic powermod situation where the admins want to micromanage every community. It also was struggling under load.
- Lemmy.world was scaled quickly to handle the load, hasn’t been controversial in their policies, and for the most part just works.
As has been pointed out in other comments, the power of the fediverse is that if one instance becomes “evil”, users and communities can and will abandon it for another instance.
Isn’t it a bit funny that you are asking that after you have already joined the server and accepted all the rules, etc?
Do we know he’s a jolly good fellow?
I mean that’s up to you to decide, idk. what answer you are expecting… You have the same information on him as we do, the info on his mastadon:
Tbh when I joined I didn’t completely understand the fediverse. I tried to join Lemmy One first because it sounded generic enough. It didn’t accept new joiners so I moved to the next generic one.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that a lot of users are going to do the same. And even though I might swear in church now, I guess that’s the fragility you get with fediverse. Ruud can kill this instance at any point. He can grow bored, decide he wants to put his money elsewhere, instance can grow too big for him to afford, etc. People are angry Reddit have 30 days but Ruud could easily kill this instance overnight.
Reddit is a shithole of a company, but at least you can trust a company to like money and certain futures are simply not realistic because that would hurt the income.
I have no doubt Reddit will still be here in five years. I wouldn’t bet the same amount on any fediverse instance
Sounds like an unhealthy powermod situation again
It will be the case with the fediverse in general. But the point of the federation is to make it easier to switch instance, reducing the power of the owners.
An ideal solution to this would be a fully distributed system. But this has many technical challenges as it pushes the complexity on the client side. And the moderation is then also more complex. Federation aims at finding the good trade-off between giving power to a few capable people to manage the network, yet making it difficult for them to abuse the system as users can easily switch ship without losing their entire social network. This is similar to emails - changing your email address is a pain, but you don’t lose your contacts and can still talk to people with your new address.
This is a concern regardless of instance and the size of the instance. At least in my mind.
Personally I don’t have too much concern right now but if anything does come to light that changes that then I’ll just leave.
the owner of the server has donation links in the sidebar for the lemmy.world
I’m not sure about management structure though
