I would argue that feddit.uk is still registered under someone's name, and that the server is owned by someone. If that one person wants to sellout X years from now, they fully can

[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I was just talking about the funding. A number of users do pay for the servers, because of the relatively low cost of running an instance a small percentage of them cover all the bills.

On ownership, that's the way of the beast on what usually start out as hobby instances. I'm sure as things mature and grow a lot of us will move to establish nonprofits.

Worth noting that, for feddit.uk, I run the server and GA runs the domains, so we'd both have to agree to a sell-out. Also we didn't start the instance, just took it over when the original Admin went AWOL, so we've successfully transferred the assets before and, if Lemmy lasts long enough, we'll do it again as we get too decrepit to keep things going.

The funding is key to this as it is all done through Open Collective, so it isn't in an Admin's bank account and so changing Admins is straightforward on that front.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

Oh, I have to admit that the OpenCollective funding model is a very nice way of keeping things level.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 6 points 1 month ago

That's an inevitable part of community, it requires trust. Users need to trust admins not to mess around with the service and admins need to trust users to not make maintaining the service untenable.

Federation also helps balance the dynamic here as admins can't hold the community hostage like they can on closed systems.