Basically concerns from contributors about the governance structure of the project and how their drive for profit may impact it. And how this FOSS project with significant community contributions has it’s shareholders (yes it has shareholders) considering it their sole property.

There’s a little on Wikipedia here.

And an open letter: https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareholders-a0bf770c

could be a simple “redirect to a different instance” button, where you could select yours

Though not perfect, that would be a vast improvement on now. There are thousands of instances (remembering content is shared to Mastodon and others), and not every instance knows about every other, but you could auto-fill from the list the instance knows about, and if you end up back on that site it should remember what you selected last time and prefill it. Great idea!

Or the site could check for the cookies of known servers

This is simply not possible because browsers don’t let a site do this.

I guess the question is… how? Browsers isolate what they know about you to domains. When you go to Gmail, it doesn’t tell Gmail that you have a Hotmail email.

As far as the browser knows, lemmy.world and lemmy.ca are as different as hotmail.com and gmail.com. The token that knows you are logged into lemmy.world is not sent to any other site, that would be a huge security risk. And the browser doesn’t know what is being stored in the cookies, just that it’s there and it should only send it to the domain it came from and never another.

I don’t disagree that this is a big problem. I just don’t know how it would be solved while keeping the fediverse decentralised.

There must be some sort of way to do it.

Lemmy doesn’t handle this nicely either, though I still use this extension last updated 3 years ago: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

If you’re the one posting a link, you can use a service like https://lemmyverse.link/ which will redirect a user to the same items on their own instance (after they set their instance the first time), though that site is run by the guy behind lemmings.world that’s shutting down in a couple of months, so it’s future may be a little uncertain. I’ve also seen https://threadiverse.link/ but I don’t know who run it.

Have you tried owning the place you work?

I can absolutely understand that it’s difficult to conceptualise. For someone who already understands, the concept is dead simple.

But I still remember the confusion trying to join Mastodon all those years ago. You are shown a list of servers, huh? Never being introduced to the concept of federated social media, just being asked makes you feel like you don’t belong because you don’t understand what’s happening.

Ok, so you search around and work out that it’s across many servers. You now have to somehow pick a server with no frame of reference. Pick randomly and hope you don’t pick the lemmdgrad equivalent (which is always high on the list on join-lemmy.com BTW). Then you go to join and you have to apply - oh, but what if they don’t want me? How do they know who I am, why would they approve my application?

Each one of these things is a barrier to entry, they stack like swiss cheese so that very few people make it through.

Then there’s the part where all these people have friends that could help them through it, but the friends never mention the fediverse to them because of the whole don’t talk about thing. I am guilty of this.