It’s not just degree. In the context of social networks, decentralization refers to the location(s) of the servers and federation refers to ownership of the dat

It’s not just degree. In the context of social networks, decentralization refers to the location(s) of the servers and federation refers to ownership of the data. In that context, federation refers to multiple operators owning portions of the data in the wider network, not the ops structure a single provider is using in their back end. Theoretically you could have a centralized federated model where users own servers in a single data center! The most extreme form of both decentralization and federation is a p2p model where each user owns their own data on their own computer. I agree with the other thread that it’s best to understand the meaning behind these terms and not to rely on them as shorthand or gotchas, but we do need separate terms for these two concepts.