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I think the fact there are relays (servers) would make this fall under a federated category from a technology perspective. I think the author makes a good poin

I think the fact there are relays (servers) would make this fall under a federated category from a technology perspective. I think the author makes a good point that in actuality it’s centralized. This is akin to Bitcoin which as a technology is decentralized but realistically and socially has become centralized.

_heimdall 2y ago
The distinction between federation and decentralization is missed in basically any article or discussion I have seen related to mastodon, cryptocurrencies, nostr, etc. Decentralization ends up getting boiled down to a binary, a network is either decentralized or centralized. There's way more nuance than that, but nuance makes for boring and drawn out discussions/articles.
megadal 2y ago
I'm of the opinion that every decentralized network will effectively become centralized because of Metcalfe's law. But I also don't believe the real value in decentralized systems comes from strictly preventing such patterns from emerging anyways.