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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

> 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.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > First, nobody cares about this. This has no value proposition to users. It shouldn't even be a topic of conversation. Did you quote the wrong part? Obviously, value proposition to developers isn't a value proposition to users a lot of the time. Second, this is a dev-centric forum. > 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. It's exactly like that, yes. That's the very point: that if say, Verizon starts doing something unpleasant like spamming, they can find themselves cut off from the rest of the system. Meanwhile, unlike with POTS, any alternative is accessible to Verizon users, so they could move over with minimal pain. The ideal is that in a federated system, there's always alternatives, and no instance is too big to fail.

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.

dale_glass 3y ago
> First, nobody cares about this. This has no value proposition to users. It shouldn't even be a topic of conversation. Did you quote the wrong part? Obviously, value proposition to developers isn't a value proposition to users a lot of the time. Second, this is a dev-centric forum. > 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. It's exactly like that, yes. That's the very point: that if say, Verizon starts doing something unpleasant like spamming, they can find themselves cut off from the rest of the system. Meanwhile, unlike with POTS, any alternative is accessible to Verizon users, so they could move over with minimal pain. The ideal is that in a federated system, there's always alternatives, and no instance is too big to fail.