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My issue with federation is that so far, everything still requires some centralisation. Take Matrix for instance. The most popular homeserver by a long, long sh

My issue with federation is that so far, everything still requires some centralisation. Take Matrix for instance. The most popular homeserver by a long, long shot is the one that the Matrix foundation runs themselves. This is same for Mastadon, PeerTube, etc. If you let this experiment play out long enough, you end up with a de facto centralised system. I think P2P ends up being closer to the goal of distributed control because it doesn't tend towards centralisation over time. My issue with P2P though is that it still requires trackers for boostraping in most cases. DHT only gets you so far. I think there will be some interesting advances once IPv6 becomes more widely deployed. Hopefully this time around multicast is widely deployed on the internet. Imagine being able to subscribe to a multicast group and instantly receive DHT nodes over the internet without a tracker? Not sure how this would work in practice, but I have heard of some research being done here. I think the future looks very good for P2P applications, whereas federated applications are still on shaky ground.

wmf 6y ago
Ultimately I think developers need to take some responsibility for causing and fixing de facto centralization by not steering new users to "default" servers and refusing signups once a server has excess market share. Federated communication or social media works differently than P2P file sharing. In file sharing you're locating random anonymous peers but in social media that's the last thing that you want. When communicating with a specific person you need their identity anyway and you can use some system like DNS or a blockchain to find the server backing that identity. Multicast on the public Internet is not going to happen due to state management cost, and it's not helpful for federation anyway due to the spam problem.
Icyphox 6y ago
> My issue with federation is that so far, everything still requires some centralisation. Take Matrix for instance. The most popular homeserver by a long, long shot is the one that the Matrix foundation runs themselves. This is same for Mastadon, PeerTube, etc. If you let this experiment play out long enough, you end up with a de facto centralised system. Yeah this was Gagron's fault. Running a flagship instance was bound to result in this. I make it a point to educate people about not joining mastodon.social and finding another instance that better suits their interests.
samatman 6y ago
Mastodon and Matrix seem quite different in practice, in this regard. Who cares what the most popular Slack or Discord is? I'm sure there is one, I bet it's a lot like hanging out on ##hottub back in the day. Matrix is fantastic for organizations. Mastodon is... I mean it's a Twitter clone at end of day. People want reach, no on should be too surprised that poasters tend to cluster in the biggest instance. I think chats for companies/organizations/projects are a good fit for federation, and with the adoption of Matrix by the French and now the German government, Slack should be looking over its shoulder.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  What I'm saying is that despite Matrix and Mastodon saying they are federated services, in practice they (and things like them) tend towards centralisation anyway. The main selling point of Matrix and Mastodon is that they aren't meant to be centralised. Slack and Discord are much better products (at the moment) if you want a centralised solution. I have not yet seen a service/protocol/product that claims to be federated/decentralised, and actually is in practice. There's always a central server that heavily dominates or some kind of central system required for the whole thing to operate.
  - samatman 6y ago
    And what I'm replying to you, is that my company is not the least bit interested in growing our Matrix instance any faster than the company itself. Whereas if I ran a Mastodon instance, then of course, I would want as many users as my droplet could carry.
lokedhs 6y ago
Matrix does require some de facto centralisation for the identity server. But Mastodon really doesn't. I can set up a server right now and start federating immediately without involving any central system.

wmf 6y ago

Ultimately I think developers need to take some responsibility for causing and fixing de facto centralization by not steering new users to "default" servers and refusing signups once a server has excess market share. Federated communication or social media works differently than P2P file sharing. In file sharing you're locating random anonymous peers but in social media that's the last thing that you want. When communicating with a specific person you need their identity anyway and you can use some system like DNS or a blockchain to find the server backing that identity. Multicast on the public Internet is not going to happen due to state management cost, and it's not helpful for federation anyway due to the spam problem.

Icyphox 6y ago

> My issue with federation is that so far, everything still requires some centralisation. Take Matrix for instance. The most popular homeserver by a long, long shot is the one that the Matrix foundation runs themselves. This is same for Mastadon, PeerTube, etc. If you let this experiment play out long enough, you end up with a de facto centralised system. Yeah this was Gagron's fault. Running a flagship instance was bound to result in this. I make it a point to educate people about not joining mastodon.social and finding another instance that better suits their interests.

samatman 6y ago

Mastodon and Matrix seem quite different in practice, in this regard. Who cares what the most popular Slack or Discord is? I'm sure there is one, I bet it's a lot like hanging out on ##hottub back in the day. Matrix is fantastic for organizations. Mastodon is... I mean it's a Twitter clone at end of day. People want reach, no on should be too surprised that poasters tend to cluster in the biggest instance. I think chats for companies/organizations/projects are a good fit for federation, and with the adoption of Matrix by the French and now the German government, Slack should be looking over its shoulder.

Thorentis 6y ago
What I'm saying is that despite Matrix and Mastodon saying they are federated services, in practice they (and things like them) tend towards centralisation anyway. The main selling point of Matrix and Mastodon is that they aren't meant to be centralised. Slack and Discord are much better products (at the moment) if you want a centralised solution. I have not yet seen a service/protocol/product that claims to be federated/decentralised, and actually is in practice. There's always a central server that heavily dominates or some kind of central system required for the whole thing to operate.
- samatman 6y ago
  And what I'm replying to you, is that my company is not the least bit interested in growing our Matrix instance any faster than the company itself. Whereas if I ran a Mastodon instance, then of course, I would want as many users as my droplet could carry.

lokedhs 6y ago

Matrix does require some de facto centralisation for the identity server. But Mastodon really doesn't. I can set up a server right now and start federating immediately without involving any central system.