One thing that’ll need serious consideration:
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
Edit: sorry if you saw this comment two or three times, posting can still be a bit buggy…
I will tell this nonstop, online advertisement (as a form of monetization) is pretty damn dated nowadays. You could give them literally a dollar every year and they would make more from you than serving you ads.
Unpopular opinion: I kinda feel like a reason ads are so popular nowadays is because it gives the user a way of feeling they are supporting a product/creator by doing pretty much nothing.
They are popular, because it's a way to squeeze out extra money out of the users (often in addition to paying for the product) and since the software is proprietary the users often can't do anything about it.
Btw notice how most youtubers turned into salesmen that want to sell you something in each video and their sponsored segments are often minutes long.
your post is very interesting for me to consider
The ad industry is really secretive in general. There aren't many studies proving that targeted advertising even works. If the data was even slightly in the ad industry's favor, they'd release it. Their entire job is spinning things to look good.
I suspect that targeted advertising was invented to justify the existence of advertising companies as middlemen. Take for example the ExplainXKCD wiki. They just serve their own ads which are usually for tech products trying to reach Sysadmins. If every company did this, the ad industry would wilt.
I'm thinking about creating my own personal instance hosted on maybe a RasPi or something, just for myself. It would cost very little (RasPi and Domain name are already laying around unused..).
It might not be the fastest, and if my internet is down then the instance won't be available (but then again I'd be the only one using it anyway).
But I'm still trying to figure out other pros/cons with that approach.
Edit: Here is a nice write up on why this might not be the best idea...
I fully support that idea. Nothing comes free and as a lemmy.world user I’m using lemmy.world resources to browse lemmy.ml pr whatever. It’s only fair that I fund this server to do it’s work in some way.
As long as we aren’t charged for getting the content itself.
I don't understand why people think it's necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?
No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don't notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).
Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
The difference is you cited software projects, not hosted infrastructure. A person can contribute to a FOSS dev project and not incur expenses dependent on end-users activity. Hosting a fediverse application isn't like that, somebody has to pay for the hosting and the hosting expenses will scale with user activity.
Back in 2008 I met a bunch of the VLC devs at a KDE related open source software conference. They talked about their experiences getting approached by companies with "fuck you" levels of money with offers they couldn't refuse -- and yet refused. In 2008 it was about bundling spyware with installers, largely. I always admired their stalwart refusal to bend.
Side note: this was shortly after they'd completed their transition to Qt as their toolkit. They stole their little volume control widget from KDE's media player, Amarok. The beauty of open-source and cross pollenation. I expect Lemmy and kbin and others in the fediverse will freely cross pollenate too. In the end, open source wins.
Just having ads is not a problem.
deleted by creator
I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501(c)(3) status).
Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we've gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.
Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I'm sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don't need advertisements or to profit.
When content gets federated to another instance, who does the advertising money go to? Does it go to the instance the content came from, or to the instance the content was viewed on?
As soon as ad's show up, bye bye.
Advertisements are fine, as long as it's not too hard to block, or if they follow the same rule as other posts in that you can always upvote/downvote and comment on them.
I don't think many instance admin would go for it though currently, as that would be the fastest way to turn your users against you.
I would prefer that ads NOT be the same as regular posts to prevent people from mistaking promoted ads for actual content. Reddit was really bad about this, you would click a thing thinking it was legitimate only to find out it was an ad after the fact. I want my content and my ads to remain separate. They need to be clearly marked (not stealthily marked like on reddit), the ratio of ads to content should heavily favor content, and they need to be dismissible.
Maybe admins could start with opt-in ads that they ask if you want when you create an account? Very few people would accept them but some would and even tho it wouldn't cover the costs it could help a bit. You definitely shouldn't just enable ads for all tho
I'd say "sort of." Lemmy as a software is under a classic benevolent dictator situation. It's open source but as long as the lead devs remain two people we are kind of at their whim. Yeah someone could fork it but it's the same issue of you're now at the whim of that person keeping their fork up to date and what they want to do. Until they kind of allow more people having a say on the main repo it's up in the air what happens truly.
We've seen this same situation with Emby to Jellyfin. Where the open source project gets so good it goes close source, becomes a company and leaves everyone scrambling to get people to help work on the last bit of open source code. Meanwhile Emby just used their huge install base to upsell people. Jellyfin is still trying to get full parity with Emby despite Jellyfin having thousands of contributors and being open source. It's hard to keep up with well funded innovation compared to volunteer work.
so good it goes close source
That's what the GPL is for: preserve freedom of the users.
To put a finer point on it, that's precisely why it's important for Free Software to be copyleft rather than merely permissively-licensed. (And for it to either have a trustworthy copyright holder, like the Free Software Foundation or similar non-profit, or to have too many copyright holders to make changing the license tractable.)
I jumped ship from Emby to Jellyfin a long time ago. Just looked at their site now: "Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps." Pretty sure you get all that in Jellyfin already.
There is no dictator. The developers don't have any control over people's instances. They have very little power. We are the ones that have all the power since Lemmy is decentralized and Free Software.
On Reddit the users have way less power, but more than they realize. They can't create their own instance of Reddit, but they can leave the platform entirely (and probably overwrite all their content with gibberish), which would probably kill the company.
I'd say it's still behest to the benevolent dictator but it's easier to switch to another if one goes bad. Lemmy.world is up to 150k users. It's a main instance now and Ruud is providing server space for us all to use. If he goes bad then someone else has to step up and provide server space for other instances to take up capacity.
Benevolent dictator is a software development term, that's why it's italicized. It's not literal
Sure but anyone can implement something using the activityPub spec and federate with other instances regardless of what flavor they're using.
I think there's a good mechanism to keep that from happening given that you can always just spin up your own instance or join a different one and still be federated with every other instance of interest.
That current state of affairs (people having content on a multitude of instances) should keep that from happening, since a bad actor would need to capture sufficient content as to have the only instance worth visiting.
I can't foresee myself years from now having a problem making a new account on
some-new-lemmy.placein under 3 minutes and continuing on my merry way.Or at least that's how it seems to me.
honestly the internet should be nationalized its the only way to ensure fair competition
Not exactly. Lemmy has separated the developer role from the admin role.
From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development. Two full time developers isn't going to be enough to get Lemmy to a position it can compete against Reddit or the next Reddit. Lemmy is rough around the edges and needs work; it needs to develop ways to incorporate code from others.
From an admin role, the various servers are going to need to solve major issues, including how to fund server costs. We are also seeing the fraying of the federation model as different admins have different goals for their part of Lemmy and these goals clash with each other.
There is going to be a ton of growing pains, and some of them are going to come from the fact that there isn't a CEO of Lemmy to choose which way to resolve problems.
From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development.
No they don't. The platform is open source, so the more users they have, the more of those users will become contributors.
Yes they do. This is why some FOSS goes to places like Apache, why there's a Python foundation, Spark has Databricks, Kafka Confluent and Trino Starburst.
The good thing about open source is that it allows everyone to contribute code to the base. The bad thing about open source is thay it allows everyone to contribute code to the base.
You need repo maintainers, developers that are constant contributor, code reviewers, people maintaining CI CD Pipelines, etc etc.
Yes it's less than having proprietary, but it's nowhere near "0".
But how is the organization going to handle and review all this additional code? You can't just trust someone coded something correctly without reviewing the code.
This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.
Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn't until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail -- donations are nice but are never enough.
As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.
We'll need someone to input that data, I guess we'll need to create a new position for that.
I shall be the CAIIO (chief AI input officer) and may salary will only be $150m.
I disagree. The Free Software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system weren't created for profit, but for user freedom. There is nothing wrong with making money in an ethical way (unlike what Reddit does), but that is not necessary for projects to survive and there are plenty of examples of this. Debian for example is a fully free operating system and it's maintained entirely by volunteers for free.
The Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Blender Foundation. They are all non-profits.
The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances
It's not quite the same, but Meta/Instagram is working on a Twitter competitor that will use ActivityPub and therefore is essentially one huge Fediverse instance that they're launching.
I didn’t know their version would use ActivityPub, that’s very interesting.
AI CEOs sound like a nightmare, lol. They're exactly as capitalistic as the data they trained on but now "the AI said it so it must be objectively good"
And with the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy which created a significant base of decentralised online community, we just witnessed history where human beings achieved the next level of freedom of expression free from manipulation by a handful of powerful individuals
What is the percentage of users?
Very tiny, but I suspect that the ones that left are of higher than average quality.
It takes a long ass time for social media to die. Because the bulk of users just don't use it often.
Shit, Fark is still technically going.
There's millions of zombie reddit accounts and bots that will never be shut down.
What you need to pay attention to is the active user numbers.
Yes, finally!
One issue that I don't think Lemmy has tackled collectively is the licensing of the user data. Lemmy is open source and that's one crucial part of the enshittification resistance equation. The other is doing the equivalent for the user data. If the user data is licensed under the right version of the CC license, it will ensure that it can always be copied to another instance in cases of instance enshittification. As far as I know, there isn't anything about who owns the user data. That defaults to every author having copyright over their data. While this means the instance owner can't sell it without permission from every user it's also not conductive to moving bulk data across instances. Individual migration would improve this significantly but I believe we should switch to having user data licensed under some CC license too.
If all of this sounds strange, think Wikipedia. That's what guarantees data contributed to Wikipedia stays within our hands irrespective of what the Wikimedia Foundation does.
This is a great point. The user data needs to be enshrined in such a way that it can be easily moved in a bulk migration without requiring a direct opt-in from every user. While at the same time making it clear how it's being used/kept/sold/not sold/etc.
I'm not against LLMs using the data generated on sites like this to inform useful answers when I ask ChatGPT a question. It genuinely makes AI a better tool, but I feel like the contributors of such content should know how their answers are being used.
What license would be appropriate for that? I've always been interested since I do photography, and it seems like any site like that needs nearly full rights so that they can store and distribute as they see fit so that they can do backups, migration, etc. What license would give those, but keep the full rights of the creator intact?
(I know nothing on the topic, just curious)
It's called decentralized
You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting.
If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.
But there will be other instances. If this one does something stupid, then we go to another one and miss almost nothing.
That's a bit like saying "Yeah so we don't care what reddit does, because you can always go somewhere else"
It's the biggest instance, so it's where most of the community and content would be etc etc. Just like what happened with beehaw could happen to world as well. This is only true for a mature decentralized federated ecosystem with a lot of redundant communities so that if one goes down you can easily consume the same content from a different instence. Is that the case now? I would say no, so it's even less leader-proof.
It depends what he's the CEO of. For example whether it's a non-profit, a for-profit, a co-op, etc. It also depends on the licensing of the data. I don't think this last bit has been tackled by Lemmy yet. Wikipedia has done it quite successfully. If the data is licensed under CC for example, and backups are published, then migration of the whole instance becomes possible like it is for Wikipedia. That would be one hell of a disincentive to fuck around, even if the company is for-profit. Non-profit co-op plus CC-licensed data is probably the most resistant.
Does not have CEO, yet ...
But I can solve that. From now on I will take that burden.
Refer to me as super cool Lemmy CEO
First order of business, I command you lemmings to vibe.
Stay tunned for upcoming changes !!!
Lemmy.world might get a CEO, but it'll be different then the Lemmy software (which is open source) and it appears to be possible to migrate off of a given instance if this one gets unreasonable
Fuck off CEO
mmm someone is not vibbing would you like to go to lemmy.gulag ?
When we think CEO we need to think “shareholders.” Including potential shareholders as in Reddit’s case. I think sometimes we are so focused on our feelings about a “big boss” that we forget the CEO is merely an avatar for the investor point of view in a business. They answer to the board of directors who represent or are even made up of shareholders, and they are usually paid in such a way to motivate shareholder benefits, like with stock instead of a high salary.
And when we think “shareholders” we need to think “loan money.” That’s how you get to be a shareholder. You plunk down some cash to float the business.
Therefore, to really be CEO-proof, an entity needs to be fiscally independent and never need an advance of cash to keep going. It must be entirely bootstrapped, paid-as-you-go, with no one standing to gain a whole bunch or lose a whole bunch by its failure or sale. That’s kind of a lot of needles to thread when you’re building something big. It can be done but we have to know what game we’re actually playing and not get distracted by “fuck The Man” sentiments. This is about cash.
Literally this… what is happening in Reddit is the CEO attending the needs of the shareholder via the board… companies aren't the "sisters of charity". They are where they are for profit and at the very least they need to have a cash flow that allow them to pay employees and bills. There are some B Corps out there, but most of the companies are there to make the big buck. In the case of Reddit we users are just a product that they try to keep to make the company profitable selling ads or whatever. If you want a Reddit-kind-of platform user-centric we need to pay for it and become the customers instead the product.
undefined> They are where they are for profit
Initially corporations were supposed to put the public good above profits. Now they have a legal obligation to put the interest of their shareholders above all else (usually interpreted as profits above all else). It was an unfortunate shift.
It's understandable for reddit to need money to continue functioning. That's never been the argument. The problem is how unreasonable the pricing is and how unwaverable they are about it.
To be fair, CEOs are often compensated largely through stock and are therefore incentivized to boost that stock price, at least until they have the opportunity to sell (or use as collateral on a loan with an inflated valuation, I'm not super familiar with the financial trickery played at that level).
I did say pretty much just that:
and they are usually paid in such a way to motivate shareholder benefits, like with stock instead of a high salary.
So who actually owns the server this instance runs on? Doesn't it just mean they do whatever they want? So confused
There are a ton of Lemmy instances that all communicate with each other and each instance is ran on hardware by different owners. So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
My understanding is that (at present anyway) since accounts are not federated, your account on that "gone to shit" instance will be gone. Your content will still be on many federated instances, but not your account. That would be lost.
CEO proof is a good reason to describe why I want my podcasts to come via an RSS feed instead of depending on an all-in-one app. I've often said things about open gardens and interoperable services, but that preaches to the choir.
"CEO Proof" really sells it to a non technical user.
Not CEO-proof until user and community migration by individual is possible
CEO-resistant.
This. Even Lemmy could technically get fucked over
I've never thought of something being CEO-proof, but you're not wrong. Those CEO's did shit the bed in the most diarrhea way possible.
I don’t think it’s necessary “CEO proof” but it is definitely a bit better positioned to avoid the pitfalls that Twitter and Reddit have experienced. Hence the reason I am here. But there’s nothing stopping a for-profit corporation from buying out the owner of a large instance (or multiple large instances). I think the best way to try and prevent that is for people to join hyper-local, hyper-specific instances that can all connect with one another. I assume that would be the benefit of Lemmy.
You can see a good example of this in the gaming sphere as both Path of Exile and Warframe have entire instances for themselves.
Yeah I think that’s the best way to proceed. Also just found this which is really helpful for finding where people might have scattered.
Every platform/service/product that is owned by a single company is eventually going to breakdown and turn into the worst form of itself. Companies are driven by this fiscal quarter being better than the last and it is inevitable that eventually quality has to go out the window to increase profits. The only sure-fire way to "reset" quality or force the company to ensure quality is to not monetarily support them. But with the internet, that is very difficult to achieve with having so few platforms that connect us all owned by companies. The only answer on keeping the internet a quality space for socialization and connecting with each other, is decentralization.
I agree. I don't see any reason at this point that anyone who sees the issues with services going all profiteering/corporate mode would migrate to another privately controlled, closed-source, ultimately profit-minded site (like Squabbles, lol).
In the Fediverse there are no Zuckerbergs, Musks, Dorseys, Huffmans etc.
There is ALWAYS the possibility to enshittify anything. Meta is trying to infiltrate Mastodon already.
Also MBA proof!
Well I'm not so sure about that. Just give it time, someone will find a way to monetize it. People are creative.
The problem isn’t necessarily people monetizing a platform, it’s forcing everyone to participate in the monetization whether they want to or not.
If there was a hypothetical Lemmy instance that was ad-supported or even subscription-based, that would be fine. Because we always have the choice to go to a different instance.
I agree that the more accurate term is "board-proof" but I still think "CEO-proof" conveys the idea better to someone who is unaware of the way social media corpos work. The image of the shady CEO with his pinstripe suite and greased hair, lighting his big cigar with a wad of dollar bills is so strong in the cultural conciousness, that even my inlaws would switch to a federated plattform.
Thankfully options like this are becoming available because it's really annoying to need to continually "digitally migrate" away as these corporate controlled websites become enshittified.
Unspezzable.
NoCEOShitification
i hope it stays that way. i'm sick of these ceos and their garbage :/
No it isn't. A company can be formed to be the steward of either or both the Lemmy source code or popular instances, which would be run by a CEO. I bet anything these corporate structures naturally form as people try to monetize the community and seek investment to gain control over the ecosystem.
The hurdle to that is much greater here since there's a common protocol adopted by multiple open source projects (of which Lemmy) which allows interoperability. If a profit-driven group would try to capture it, people could move instances/use a fork/use a different but similar activitypub project like kbin, etc.
At least I think that's correct? It seems to me there are multiple lines of defense which each have a good amount of redundancy.
That's not entirely true. Plenty of FLOSS software exist that are also run by corporations.
The secret is that corporate FLOSS maintainers are "service providers" and make their living that way, but the code is a public-access creative output that allows others to render that service.
It's a somewhat implicit contract of saying "Live and let live, since I'm technically have more power strictly because I designed the darn thing." Sorta scratches the ego and also allows freedom for everyone else at the same time.
My only concern is extremists making use of it to organize, spread misinformation, coordinate attacks, etc. and there's zero oversight. That's a serious concern that needs addressing, but I have no idea how.
Ban those communities from your instance. There's not going to ever be any way to prevent them starting their own, all you can do is defederate. There doesn't need to be any more.
Yeah, same thing that happened when gab started a Mastodon instance, everyone immediately defederated from them for being Nazis and their reach stayed confined to only their own platform. Deplatforming is never completely stripping a platform from a person/group, it's more of a quarantine. Keep them isolated from the wider community so they can't recruit new members, and their groups wither
I mean, if it's real bad shit like violence, that's where FBI comes in, right?
Not sure if the ACLU would be able to do anything about hate speech.
But bad actors would have to run a shell game of go between instances to recruit. And they've been doing that shit for decades anyways. Hell, it's the same thing as under 18 punk shows back in the day when nazis hung in the parking lot trying to give booze/drugs to kids.
Like, imagine if someone said we can't have phones because assholes can also buy a phone...
To be fair, it's not like those were under control on Reddit either.
Any extremist group can get a server and start a forum, and talk however they want. The point is not to try to censor them, but ignore their instances/users, so it becomes it's own bubble (same thing as them having their own forum).
Would a “community notes” feature like Twitter be useful or even work in this context?
That and more all exist in Fediverse already. https://jointhefediverse.net/join
There will never be a time when you need adds to pay for a server even if you had a server with 50 million people the cost to run that server might be like 100k if just 1 million people pay 1 dollar you already have 1 million dollars a month you only need adds when your a company that needs to grow every quarter
I would pay for a service like a form where robots and scrapers have no access and is FLOSS. I want to be able to access it from a terminal
One day the lemmy could just go closed source and sell to a company.
If they went closed source that would mean they would have a similar situation to Emby. They went closed source after a time which gave rise to people forking the last public build and making Jellyfin which is an excellent alternative.
Even if they do, they would not be able to force instance owners to update to the closed version. And people would take over the last available open source version and fork it. Also, a closed and open source version could co-exist, since the api is open.
Protocol is open, anyone can rewrite a federation client that pulls data off proprietary servers as a last resort. This is why federation is great. Besides, you can't close an open source project, you have to create new, closed parts to have them. That's how mariadb and galera took a chunk off mysql user base and how libreoffice became a successor of openoffice.
As a side note, I wish we could move accounts and even communities between instances, based on some kind of two way handshake agreement.
Right? Currently if an instance fails then all the communities hosted on that instance and comments are essentially 'gone' correct?
sweet summer child
We do have a term for that, it's a little bit of a trigger-word for certain demographics, but the correct term is socialism.
The largest (at least well funded) socialist organization in the world is the US military...
If everyone got the shit I got as a disabled vet, we'd all be a lot better off and the only negative would be rich people have a slightly lower high score that's 100% irrelevant to how their quality of life is.
TL;DR: Yeah, I 100% agree, if everyone had a strong safety net, we'd be much better off.
When it works it works. I mean I have met several people who've expressed a lot of sincere dissatisfaction with the VA's medical services, including limited access to mental healthcare among other things. Particularly of concern is the high degree of veterans who end up on the street--many with severe mental health issues, with some even self-medicating and/or dealing with addictions.
Of course, I'm sure there are more factors that contribute to homeless veterans than limited accessibility to medical care, mental healthcare, and other social services provided by the VA--but it is important to consider.
..and of course, as you are aware, it's better to have those social systems in-place than nothing at all. Even when run to a degree of mediocrity, socialist programs can and do tend to benefit a population. While not everyone may like the Supplemental Security Income and FAFSA programs: without them, I wouldn't be able to attend a university as a future job-seeking student.
Specifically without SSI, many who are unable to pursue a degree would end up homeless and hungry, becoming a greater burden on society. In my opinion, it's unfortunate that you have to have a disability in order to qualify for this safety-net program; as I know several people who turned to less favorable means of providing for themselves, because they were rock-bottom and didn't qualify for any programs.
So, yeah, the VA program, and many other programs in the US are great examples of both some of the harms, but also the significant positive benefits that socialist policies can have for a population. Indeed, the greatest harms done by socialist programs in the US seem to be caused by their limitations and inability to properly serve enough people. Providing a everyone access to a solid safety net would do wonders for us as a society and for our economy.
Can you define "socialism"? I'm a little lost on how any social media with a hosting provider or moderator can ever be socialism.
TL;DR The fediverse represents a socialist philosophy in that these servers are not all administered by a centralized authority, but by the individuals who put forth the labor to bring them into existence.
Socialism doesn't necessarily have a strict definition. There are some who assert such definitions, but take the work of Karl Marx, he wrote a criticism of capitalism in an analytical fashion. There's Marx-influenced socialism, but to say "Marxism" is a little misleading, because it's not like he proposed an exact plan for how to run an economy and government, rather he discussed the problems with how we assign value to labor.
In general, and in my opinion, socialism as a broader philosophy is the idea that society should be constructed in such a way that it behaves in the interest of the people. In other-words, the goal is to design functional social systems that can ensure equal rights to a high quality of life, while also incentivizing and rewarding participation(I know many suggest that modern capitalism does this, but it doesn't).
So, in the case of social media and the fediverse, these federated networks are comparable to social systems that are operated by the public, governed by the public, and funded by the public. Therefore, see TL;DR.
From empirical evidence we learned that no way in socialism we can enjoy this kind of freedom of expression.
Not entirely true, I sort of jest when I make hyperbolic statements about socialism being the anti-CEO. I personally believe in mixed economies that are well regulated. I know a lot of people dismiss the successes in Norway and neighboring countries on ideas of "cultural/racial homogeneity" among other things, but they do quite well with mixed economies.
In mixed economies, you have both the right and incentive to start a small to medium sized business; and if you become too big and ubiquitous, the government can step-in to help govern your company.
It's not a perfect solution (I'm not sure if that exists), but I think it's one of the best models we have--and a lot of the governing principles are derived from socialist criticisms of unregulated capitalism. Especially in the US I think we'd benefit from this sort of economic structure; but in-order for that to happen in a meaningful and positive way for the public, we will need electoral reform.
Edited: ¶1 "with a mixed economies" to "with mixed economies".
