I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars "web3"
I'm enjoying the lemmy.world experience, and I believe decentralised social networking could be the future. I am a refugee from Reddit and hopeful there is hope for a open, community focused platform.
As for this platform, I am apprehensive about somebody running the server I have my account with having the power to remove my account and my posts, but I guess this is true of any network in existence.
My concern in the long run is who pays for the hardware and energy costs even if it is federated. Without some kind of reliable funding model who will pay the bills?
Hopeful for many enjoyable encounters in the Fediverse.
It's no different from using an email provider. Just get one that you trust will stay a while. But there are no guarantees. Google could kill off GMail tomorrow.
You'll always have to rely on someone else, unless you build the thing yourself.
The beauty of the fediverse concept is that it's about as easy as possible to build it yourself.
The cost of running a host is a matter of economical management:
It costs almost nil to run text-based content.
Images take a bit of memory and bandwidth, but are even manageable with an old cellphone under a set number of users.
Videos are a major drag, and very expensive unless you're embedding them.
Most open-source is funded as passion projects by devoted geeks who typically already make a living doing other computer things anyway, and fediverse is a bit of the same.