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Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to av

• api 3y ago
  The biggest problem with federation is easily visible in e-mail: the server “owns” your address and therefore moving in very hard. It’s not much better than any other silo in that way. Mastodon is a bunch of small social sites in a trenchcoat. There are ways to make identity floating and separate from the server, at least in theory, but ActivityPub (the protocol under Mastodon and many other things) does not implement anything like this.
  • eropple 3y ago
    This is one of the things that Bluesky's ATProto is trying to solve, and have been making steps towards it. We'll see if it gets there, but I find their thinking generally pretty persuasive.
    • mariusor 3y ago
      > I find their thinking generally pretty persuasive Is it persuasive enough to have multiple implementations and multiple instances running? How many instances of blue sky are there running out there?
• dale_glass 3y ago
  > Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users. Federation IMO solves problems on the developer side: 1. We want to write software, not to wrangle with the laws of a hundred countries. 2. We don't want to deal with providing infrastructure for millions of users. 3. We don't want to run a community in general. Our passion is software, we don't really care what they talk about. On the user side, the value proposition is lack of lock-in. That if you like the system, you'll eventually find some place where you fit in. > What would be the benefit to a user of federation? If Twitter were federated with other services, basically you'd have a way to reach select Twitter users from a saner place. > Can I, as a user, set up my own server like I theoretically can with email? How then do we police content in such a world? What about bad actors spamming as we get with POTS and email? Who enforces things like law enforcement requests and content moderation? People federating with you can decide to stop dealing with you in that case. Federation doesn't mean links can't be broken, or never established in the first place. > Twitter may well die. Who cares? It'll get replaced by something else. Federation just isn't going to happen with these philosophical arguments given all the practical problems. No system is perfect, but IMO a federated system, if done well enough is more resilient. In a federated system, the hope is that something like Twitter would be just one of many providers. Thus if the leadership goes nuts one day, it has to content with that there's 20 other nigh identical providers, and that it can over time be marginalized if it keeps being crazy. Also, ideally federation means each community can be more focused, and have its own culture and local rules that make sense for it, but may not make sense for anyone else.
  • jmyeet 3y ago
    > Federation IMO solves problems on the developer side: I couldn't disagree more. First, nobody cares about this. This has no value proposition to users. It shouldn't even be a topic of conversation. Second, IMHO it's not even true. It's a bit like how you split a monolithic into microservices. Now you've created a bunch of versioning and orchestration problems where you have to deal with network issues. Federation means talking to third-parties, dealing with them being unreachable or behaving badly. It's a whole new class of problems. > f Twitter were federated with other services, basically you'd have a way to reach select Twitter users from a saner place. There's a ton of hand-waving that goes along with this statement. It's like if you tried to cut out talking to Verizon on your POTS exchange. Well, technically you can do that but then you can't talk to the customers on that service and they can't talk to you.
• calamari4065 3y ago
  I'm not sure how much you actually know about this stuff, but this take reads like you fundamentally don't understand the subject. Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up. We can all agree that as user count goes up, abuse and moderation scales as well. A centralized platform takes all of that moderation load at once. You need a team of people or some crazy moderation software that doesn't work. Abuse runs rampant as the company doesn't want to invest in proper moderation. We see that on twitter, Facebook, tumblr, all of them. The fediverse aims to solve this problem by limiting scale. Smaller communities are easier to moderate. We see this with forums and chat rooms. When the community is small, they tend to self-police more. People tend to self-identify with that community and actively protect it. But small communities are small and don't reach far. So we connect these small communities into larger networks. The implementation details of that are IMO pretty much irrelevant, but to answer your question: posts are duplicated throughout the network. Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network. Bad actors aren't much of a concern. If you start a server that just blasts spam into the fediverse, the network will quickly drop you. Individual servers have the option to refuse connections from other servers or domains. Server admins actively network with each other to warn of malicious servers. So far it's been incredibly effective. As a user, you also have the option to block servers or other users. You also have extensive filtering options so that you can effectively moderate your own timeline. And of course, there's also the drama between server admins blocking each other and harming users by cutting them off from part of the network. The solution I chose was to start up my own server. It took a weekend and operates exactly the same as the big instances I've been on. When a server shuts down, users can move elsewhere. You can keep all your follows and followers, but lose your post history. That's obviously not ideal, but what were you able to keep when MySpace closed down? It's not perfect, but you can still keep going. Plus there are limited workarounds, but that's not important. The fediverse has problems, but not the ones you pose. Ask yourself how one scales a website to tens of millions of users. It's pretty complicated, right? Lots of servers and load balancers and whatever else. But what about a website for a thousand users? Ten thousand? That's much more doable. That's just a single machine. The magic of federation is linking ten thousand websites run by volunteers that each host only a thousand users into a more or less cohesive network. No matter which node in the network your account belongs to, you get roughly the same experience. No one has to spend millions filling up a datacenter. Most servers are run on donations from users or out of their admin's pocket. It doesn't cost too terribly much unless you're serving thousands of users. When one server goes down, even a very large server, the network stays intact and absorbs the load and the users as they migrate. When a server with tens of thousands of users shuts down, we don't see a dramatic drop in total network users. Nearly all of them just move. This makes the network very resilient. No one person can do any meaningful damage to the network as a whole. Fediverse is far from perfect. And I agree that it won't be a monetized ad- and celebrity-friendly platform like Facebook or twitter. But that's fundamentally misunderstanding what and why it is. The fediverse is the next logical step from hundreds of small isolated forums. People built and use federated services because they want small communities driven by and for people who simply want to talk to other people. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not going to grow to encompass billions of users because that's simply not the goal. The goal of the fediverse is simple: give people a place to talk and share with each other that is controlled exclusively by people who want the same thing. No money, no tracking, no corporations, just people talking to other people. Everyone I know on mastodon is perfectly happy with the way things are. We see a very stable network with slow and steady growth. That's pretty much all we want or need.
• getynge 3y ago
  I always thought the idea of federation from the users perspective is something of a middle ground between small community forums and social monoliths like twitter. Small-ish communities that for the most part see content that is part of that community but is not entirely isolated from other communities either. Also means that if somebody comes along and screws up one instance it just gets defederated and the people that want to move do so.
• Zak 3y ago
  I'm confused by this comment. It's written as if federated social media is a hypothetical technology someone is proposing. It isn't. It's a real technology with dozens of interoperable implementations, thousands of running servers, and millions of users. A precursor of the currently popular ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon launched 15 years ago with Laconica and has been under continuous development since.