I don’t think owners should have a say in the content of the discussion. That is something for users and moderators to decide. I have had enough of the “take my ball and go home” situations. Make the database an encrypted blob that cannot be inspected directly.

Alternatively, there is no reason for instances to exist anyway. All computer users have orders of magnitude more compute power to each run their own single user instance. On their five year old phone and even in the dishwasher.

Text is small. Being a hard drive owner would not grant leverage over the freedom of expression of others.

Lemmy is not distributed enough, there is still too much power concentrated in the hands of the owner class and the moderator class.

Users should be their own owners. Moderators will still be needed but they will only operate with the consent of each user to mask off the content they don’t want to see.