4 ms·

Isn't that federated rather than decentralized?

• kornhole 4y ago
  What distinction do you mean? Federation allows for interoperable decentralization. Without federation, we would have thousands of chat/mail/social media servers that can't talk to each other. Some may choose not to federate, but most want to federate to create a useful protocol.
  • sodality2 4y ago
    I always believed decentralized was if each user doubled as a server and required no external setup (example: scuttlebutt). Whereas federated was a plurality of servers with users communicated with each other but no central authority (email, mastodon, matrix, etc). However, reading some peer to peer literature like that 1500 page behemoth of a book, "Handbook of Peer-to-Peer Networking", it seems they are used relatively interchangeably..
    • zaik 4y ago
      Either way it's a lot better than walled-garden style messengers like Telegram or Signal.
    • Arathorn 4y ago
      the terminology we use in Matrix is: “federated” = servers can talk to each other; eg email, xmpp, sip, activitypub “decentralised” = data is replicated between servers; eg matrix rooms are replicated equally between the participating servers; usenet “distributed” = data is replicated between p2p nodes; eg git, p2p matrix, bittorrent.