4 ms·
> Convenience doesn't require centralization Of course it does, because otherwise you are dealing with a patchwork of different entities operating parts of the
by this_user 3y ago
> Convenience doesn't require centralization
Of course it does, because otherwise you are dealing with a patchwork of different entities operating parts of the federated system. Those entities are most likely operating with different standards and different levels of professionalism. In the end, you are offloading tasks to the end users like figuring out the structure of it all, where to sign up, which instances to join, how to get access to the content you are looking for, what to do when things inevitably break. In a centralised system, most of these questions don't exist, and everything else is being taken care of by the operator who has a vested interest in things running as smoothly as possible.
What you are describing are mostly UI problems, but even if those had been solved, it would still a worse experience. The average user doesn't even know what "federated" means, the don't want to be thinking about local and remote instances, they just want things to work.
- vvillena 3y ago> The average user [...] just want things to work. Indeed. This is why convenience means moving all things 'federation' to the background. Remember eDonkey, eMule, and the ED2K network? It started as a federated network, and it added a second decentralized network later on. And it was successful, because users didn't have to care about the inner workings of the product. There were a bunch of external sites acting as link aggregators, but there was a builtin search feature too that worked well (until hash collisions catched up with the stagnant protocol). To me, this is still a shining example of how to do federation right. There were multiple clients, standard communication protocols, and it was easy to take advantage of the full federated network, because it didn't take any effort to do so.
- vkou 3y agoThe problem is that while the users shouldn't care, they should also care (as the Lemmy instance you use does not want to federate with the one discussing CP).