

James R Kirk
People are talking about privacy but the big reason is that it gives you, the owner, control over everything quickly without ads or other uneeded stuff. We are so used to apps being optomized for revenue and not being interoperable with other services that it’s easy to forget the single biggest advantage of computers which is that programs and apps can work together quickly and quietly and in the background. Companies provide products, self-hosting provides tools.
With Mastodon you can migrate your account, Lemmy can’t migrate (yet). But the difference between Fediverse and commercial platforms is that you can access the same network of content from different instances. With Twitter/Reddit etc. everyone is forced onto a single instance (and a single moderation policy).
The fact that this is being upvoted so much I think demonstrates a big misunderstanding of how the fediverse works.
Nobody owns Lemmy and if a instance does something shitty it costs hardly anything to change instances. Nobody owns the lemmy software, and other softwares like mbin/piefed exist too with the same content.