loading . . . Who owns the Fediverse? Is the Fediverse owned by a corporation or venture capital firm? Can it be bought out by Google/Facebook/Elon Musk? Short answer: no one owns the Fediverse, and in practical terms it cannot be bought out by anyone.
Longer answer: ownership of the Fediverse is spread out across thousands of totally independent servers, each of which has its own owners. (It’s somewhat similar to how the world’s phone network is made up of hundreds of different phone providers, and no one owns them all.)
Because the ownership is so spread out, it would be extremely difficult for anyone to buy the entire network. Even if someone tried, anyone can start a new server and new servers would start appearing straight away. People could move their accounts off a bought-out server onto an independent one.
## What kind of people own Fediverse servers?
The actual owners of Fediverse servers are usually unpaid volunteers, non-profit community groups, co-operatives, NGOs or governments. The running costs are covered by the server owners themselves, usually supported by donations from their users. There are no investors, no venture capital firms, no ads, no trackers, no corporations.
Companies can start their own Fediverse server if they want to, anyone can, but all they would control is their own server. They would have no control over the thousands of other servers out there.
## Who owns the software that the servers run on?
The Fediverse is built on free and open source software, made by many independent groups, and the software copyrights are licensed in such a way that no company or organisation could ever take control of them.
## Do Fediverse servers depend on any kind of central server or central infrastructure?
No. There is no central server or central relay. Every server is independent and connects directly to other servers.
There are such things as Fediverse relays, but they’re totally optional and aren’t run by any central organisation.
## What about mastodon.social? Isn’t that the central server?
No. It’s just another server. It has no technical differences from any other Mastodon or Fediverse server.
The only reason people talk about mastodon.social as if it was “default” is because it’s owned by the lead developers of the Mastodon server software. However, it does not have any kind of special status on the network.
## How does Mastodon relate to the Fediverse?
Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, see the “What is Mastodon? What is the Fediverse?” article for more info.
## I thought Mastodon belonged to some guy called Gargron or Eugen or something?
No.
The software which runs on most Mastodon servers is developed by a software organisation in Germany called Mastodon gGmbH, which is run by Eugen Rochko (also known as “Gargron”). This organisation publishes this software under a free open source licence so anyone can use it, distribute it or modify it. Many of the contributions made to the software are from people outside the organisation, so this open licence is of benefit to everyone.
Rochko’s organisation also runs two Mastodon servers (mastodon.social and mastodon.online) and the JoinMastodon.org promotional website, but they do not own or have any control over any other servers. Also, many Fediverse servers run on totally different kinds of software which aren’t made by Rochko’s organisation at all.
## What about the apps? Who owns them?
The “official” apps for Mastodon are made by Rochko’s organisation and are aimed at new users. However, the third party Mastodon apps are not made by Rochko’s organsation. The third party apps have been around a lot longer than the official ones, and tend to be better designed with more features. You can use your Mastodon account (and many non-Mastodon Fediverse accounts) with any of these apps, you don’t have to use the official apps.
The “official” Mastodon apps have no technical advantages over third party apps, they all have equal access to Mastodon’s features.
## I thought apps and social networks were the same thing?
In recent years companies like Meta/Facebook and Twitter have attempted to drive people onto their official apps in order to control their experience more tightly. This has happened to such an extent that many people now refer to social networks as “apps”.
There used to be many third party Facebook and Twitter apps you could use, but the corporations who own Facebook and Twitter didn’t like this lack of control so they gradually started to block all other apps from their services except their own. Because Facebook and Twitter are built on closed standards and based on single servers, there was nothing the third party app makers could do about it.
Mastodon and the Fediverse are different, they are built entirely on open standards and spread across thousands of independent servers. That means no one can force you to use a particular app, you can choose from many different apps and they will all work with your account. Any company or programmer can make a new Mastodon/Fediverse app if they want to, and there are no restrictions on the features they can provide.
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