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The real value of federation, and the value of a standard like ActivityPub, didn't fully click for me until I realized I could follow Blender's PeerTube experim
by rainbowmverse 8y ago
The real value of federation, and the value of a standard like ActivityPub, didn't fully click for me until I realized I could follow Blender's PeerTube experiment from my Mastodon account.
If enough sites start supporting it, you could get many of the benefits of RSS with the few benefits of massive silos like Twitter and Facebook.
- mtgx 8y agoAnti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network. But when you start having global monopolies in various industries that don't care about automatically banning the "little guy" from which they make little money to begin with and when you have governments that are increasingly more interested in let's say "curating" the internet, then that anti-censorship benefit starts to become a lot more appealing to a lot more people. It's why I'm glad Firefox is not only finally a decent competitor to Chrome but also starting to adopt all sort of anti-censorship protocols and technologies, too (and hopefully there are more to come).
- rainbowmverse 8y ago>> "Anti-censorship has always been the #1 benefit of federation and peer-to-peer connectivity. I don't think any other benefits come even close, and they are usually overshadowed by how much more difficult it is to build a well-working federated or P2P network." The rank of benefits is, of course, highly subjective. I'm speaking for myself.
- snissn 8y agoYour comment resonates with Maslow's hierarchy of needs on a digital level. Society's primary benefit is safety and decentralization creates the internet's base offering of security
- CNJ7654 8y ago>Society's primary benefit is safety This is subjective, my favorite benefit from society is guaranteed freedoms. Luckily decentralization also offers a great deal of freedom on the internet :)
- apotheon 8y ago"a decent competitor" How did it do that? It threw away all the technical and usability benefits it had over Chrome, so I guess it's "a decent competitor" instead of "a clear winner" for some purposes, like it once was. Is that what you mean?
- detaro 8y agoA non-empty set of Mastodon users probably picked precisely for it's "censorship" abilities, unhappy with how Twitter handles it and wanting a space where their instance can enforce its own policies.
- fenwick67 8y agoThe real benefit of federation is that anywhere on the moderation spectrum is possible on a per-instance basis.
- ajconway 8y agoBanning federated networks is actually much easier than dealing with an important centralized entity like Facebook or Google. Just ban every node that provides access to illegal content.
- incompatible 8y agoChina is happy to ban both, difficulty doesn't seem to be an issue.
- jesse_m 8y agoHow do you subscribe from mastodon? I see the video.blender.org is their instance right?
- rainbowmverse 8y agoPut @blender@video.blender.org in the search box.
- mgummelt 8y agoI think you've hit on the actual end user benefit - aggregation. The article is either pitching abstractions like "compatibility" or solutions to non-problems like the risk that Facebook might vanish. Though I'm not convinced aggregation is a big problem.