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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
by 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 agoEither way it's a lot better than walled-garden style messengers like Telegram or Signal.
- Arathorn 4y agothe 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.