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There's no difference between possession / control and ownership in your position, which is conflating normative (ownership) with descriptive (possession / control).

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My basic point is that there may be bits of land where technically no person or organization is listed as the de jure owner, but if you go there and start using it, someone will show up and kick you off. So if some abstract principle of justice allows homesteading, in practice it is useless. There is no place to homestead any more.

Maybe Liberland will prove me wrong. Maybe they will allow homesteading. But if it requires permission from someone, isn't that the owner, giving it away?

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There is. De facto ownership means someone is able to exclude others from using it. This is descriptive. De jure means that there are laws or property norms that establish someone as the owner, whose consent is required to use the land and so may exclude persons from using it legitimately. This is normative or prescriptive. It is also social rather than physical.

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