Reddit answers to shareholders and a board of directors. Each fediverse instance is run by its owner and negotiates with other instances to federate.
If some bigshot wants to own reddit or rule it like a totalitarian asshole, he can buy it and vandalize it if he wants to. If some bigshot wants to own the fediverse, good luck buying the thousands of instances that exist and they still wouldn’t get us, because we’d move to or create new instances.
If some bigshot wants to own reddit or rule it like a totalitarian asshole
If?
Awesome! And if I may: What does it mean to “federate”?
Basically it means to connect, to form a relationship with each other, in this case specifically to make one’s content visible to each other.
I imagine it like being in a building (fediverse) with many rooms (instances) that will open up doors or pathways (federating) to each other to allow for free movement between the rooms. Your account might be based in one room, like you have your own cubbyhole, but if the door is open you can go somewhere else.
That was a good analogy.
It’s sort of like email. There’s enough commonality in form and function that different versions of the same thing can talk to each other but you can pick where you have your account.
While you wait for someone to type one up, here’s more of an ELI14:
