Mastodon and Diaspora are federated softwares, which means there is still a server/client model, but many servers (a more well known example of federated decent

Mastodon and Diaspora are federated softwares, which means there is still a server/client model, but many servers (a more well known example of federated decentralization is smtp). ssb (common short for secure-scuttlebutt) is fully decentralized, which means that there is no server/client anymore, everyone is a node (like the initial idea of bitcoin). I'm biased in favor of full decentralization, but here are the main differences I can think of : * federation tends to lead to centralization again, because everyone use the same server (like gmail for smtp) * full decentralization makes it easier to build custom software (you have access to the whole data, without being constrained by an api). But this is not true for ssb, because it's harder than it should to build software on top of it. * it's easier to change software with full decentralization, because you don't have an "account" owned by a given server (think: it's hard to migrate from a mail address to an other) * onboarding is more difficult with full decentralization, because you have no easy entrypoint like a server is