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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Lemmy.ca's Main Community
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Open source just means that they're not doing stuff behind your back that you're not unaware of like collecting your data. I don't think that means that the mods of a specific instance can't arbitrarily ban users or delete comments and fuck with communities within their instance.
Open Source means I can take the code and deploy my own instance without permission from anyone.
If you can figure it out. Lemmy at this point is probably still straightforward, but for example go try to compile Android. Just compile it. Last time I tried was 2018, but I spent two full days trying before I gave up. And Android is open source.
There are ways to obscure and gate the codebase even if it is open source.
That's true, I'm just not sure how it's applicable to the current conversation? I don't think anyone is making the argument that open source projects are easy?
And you could fork the code, if the original project goes in a direction that isn't popular. Q.v. LibreOffice and OpenOffice, NextCloud and OwnCloud.
The power of open source/copyleft is that it can't be owned as such.
There are a couple of caveats, if there aren't enough developers on the forked project, it will wither. Also, there tends to be lots of fragmentation, as different visions take things in different directions (not a singular project, but what's your favourite Linux distribution?).
Having said all that, each instance is running on someone's hardware, and whoever is paying the bills has a lot of sway for that instance. As you say, since it's open source, there is nothing really stopping you as an individual being that person. A small instance with a user count of 1 is going to be fairly cheap to run. Personally it's another thing to keep up to date. Maybe with a Docky loader…
A fork of Lemmy won't "wither" like some other things, because all of this stuff uses the ActivityPub protocol and is compatible anyways. It could be abandoned and still probably work for a long time.
It's why KBin and Lemmy can work together, even though they are completely different.
you can also read it duh