this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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You can't "buy" Lemmy or Mastodon any more than you can buy email or World Wide Web
Isn't Mastadon run by an organization started by Eugen Rochko? Could this organization not be bought? Or does it not make a difference who controls Rochko's organization? Sorry to ask such basic questions - I find the Fediverse pretty confusing.
He could buy a specific mastodon instance, or a specific lemmy instance if the person running the instance decided to sell their instance. It wouldn't effect any other instance directly.
By buying the mastodon org he might be able to influence development of the mastodon software, but the software is open source and someone would just make a musk-free fork and thungs would keep moving.
Also, an overly simplistic summary of the fediverse is that instead of one reddit run by the reddit corp, anyone can run their own reddit (lemmy) instance. Each instance can talk to each other instance and access data from each other instance. So instances that talk to each other effectively function like one big combined instance.
So if Musk said to himself, "I'm going to buy Mastadon from Rochko and fill all the instances with ads!", he would be able to do that but we could always just fork and create "Mastadon 2" and then everything would be normal again? Would our content and followers and stuff follow us from Mastadon 1 to Mastadon 2? Or would it just be that the instances would have to switch from 1 to 2 and nothing would really change in terms of user experience?
The best comparison here is email. So Google created an email service and serve ads with their email. This, of course, has no effect on anyone not using Google's email service and since Google still follows the standards protocols for mail servers to talk to each other it doesn't even impact their ability to communicate with other remail servers or vice versa.
The same idea works with Mastodon and Lemmy - there isn't one centralized service that can be bought, the same way you can't buy "email" or "the web".
The absolute worst case would be Musk buying the rights to the server code and changing the license for all future versions to something closed. At which point, everyone else just forks the last open version and builds on it from there. So long as neither changes the underlying protocol this has no real effect on end users. If one of them does, then it creates a split between Muskodon and whatever the new fork is called akin to both sides defederating each other.
This makes sense, thanks for the explanation!