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The answer to your question is basically the same as for federation in real life: I don't care if they mayor of a city 300 miles away is accountable to me. I on

The answer to your question is basically the same as for federation in real life: I don't care if they mayor of a city 300 miles away is accountable to me. I only care if my mayor is accountable to me. Making mayors into presidential appointees would represent a slight increase in my influence in the city code of places I don't know the name of, but that's not a great trade for my influence in the city I live in.

SiempreViernes 2y ago
Yeah, but the question here is how your mayor being accountable to you helps with the problem that everyone's president is not being held accountable? Exactly how does it help that there's a bunch of small Wikipedia mirrors with like four different pages each that differ from the main one.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  Imagine if there was only one soft drink brand, or a single giant book.
  - SiempreViernes 2y ago
    Why stop there? Imagine there's only one brain, and everyone had to share it! More seriously, are you talking about the company coal towns in the Appalachian mountains?
pessimizer 2y ago
When you join a federated instance, the owner of it still isn't accountable to you, and is likely to be more eccentric than a centralized instance that is at least run by a larger number of people. Speaking of federation in real life reminds me of people yelling about state's rights. I'm pro-distribution, but none of these e-institutions are democratic, they're all little fiefdoms. Governance needs to be distributed, not just bandwidth.
- Gormo 2y ago
  The point of federation is that governance is distributed because each instance is autonomous. It's not about joining someone else's instance and having them still not be accountable to you -- it's about having a pluralistic pool of instances to choose from, so that you can find one that does fit your preferences, and having the ability to run your own instance if you don't find an existing one that does. The right of exit is often far more important than the right of voice, and federation offers a practical way to exercise the right of exit without surrendering access to the broader ecosystem. Democracy is not distributed governance. It's centralized governance that just allows for some form of (often performative and ineffective) input from those subject to its rules. If everyone involved has the capacity to choose or create their own "little fiefdom", that is a far better outcome than centralized democracy which offers little or no practical right of exit.
  - fellowniusmonk 2y ago
    I think you over estimate federation, I started and ran a federated wiki and it's attached company in ~2008-2014 for a particular niche because I am very pro-federation but it's not a panacea and can lead to generally worse alignment with reality. This is like a monolith vs micro services debate all over again and it shares a lot of the same issues and tradeoffs since we're talking about network efficiency, validation, throughput and error handling in systems generally. Federation fosters fragmentation and discovery issues that means unless you have a "reality reification" process a centralized but transparent and public system sees very little benefit from federation. Having a trusted (due to transparency, not perfection in data) and transparent centralized source that trends towards "true" is almost always more efficient than federation, but people seem to hate the idea of rules of governance, this makes sense, as anyone who for whatever reason disagrees with the content on wikipedia will push for fragmentation to push their position closer to the mainstream (which may very well be "more true" for a specific topic) even if the fragmentation damages accurate mapping to a shared reality in general. That's why good governance processes must include "dissent from dissenters in their own words". We must have a "good enough" in content and accuracy system that is the globally agreed on place for us to "fight" over propositions, this allows us to all be on the same page even if we disagree and to share a map of the disagreement space. Independence is not the same as governance, they are orthogonal and people who conflate this clearly haven't thought this through. Just look at denominations and churches for historical repercussions of the different approaches towards governance, excepting a very narrow subset of polity beliefs if you go to attend a "baptist church" or "bible church" you have NO CLUE what they believe or even if they are in fact a koolaid drinking death cult. I think this is good but it is very inefficient, so even in these types of denominations groups will join "conventions" to signal their belief... even then it's buyer beware. There are a lot of young earth creationists, flat earthers and corporate and political shills of various stripes who sounds plausible to those ignorant of the subject who HATE wikipedia. This hate is a sign of a generally healthy ecosystem. I think a lot of people and state actors are incentivized to denigrate anything "imperfect but auditable" as being bad, the simple fact is that humanity needs "Trusted" sources, not in the sense that they are perfect or accurate but in the sense that this platforms goal is "we're trying to align with reality as hard as possible" and we have a globally recognized and shared space to do so, which means dissenting voices will be observable in Talk pages and we ultimately have a jumping off point that has a "shared nomenclature/history" people can fight over. People assume small players are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Some people assume contrarians are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Big is not inherently more evil than small. Transparency is the core to error correction either way. Most federated systems as implemented today seem to reject transparency outright which is totally screwed up and worse than a "open" centralized system.

SiempreViernes 2y ago

Yeah, but the question here is how your mayor being accountable to you helps with the problem that everyone's president is not being held accountable? Exactly how does it help that there's a bunch of small Wikipedia mirrors with like four different pages each that differ from the main one.

whatshisface 2y ago
Imagine if there was only one soft drink brand, or a single giant book.
- SiempreViernes 2y ago
  Why stop there? Imagine there's only one brain, and everyone had to share it! More seriously, are you talking about the company coal towns in the Appalachian mountains?

pessimizer 2y ago

When you join a federated instance, the owner of it still isn't accountable to you, and is likely to be more eccentric than a centralized instance that is at least run by a larger number of people. Speaking of federation in real life reminds me of people yelling about state's rights. I'm pro-distribution, but none of these e-institutions are democratic, they're all little fiefdoms. Governance needs to be distributed, not just bandwidth.

Gormo 2y ago
The point of federation is that governance is distributed because each instance is autonomous. It's not about joining someone else's instance and having them still not be accountable to you -- it's about having a pluralistic pool of instances to choose from, so that you can find one that does fit your preferences, and having the ability to run your own instance if you don't find an existing one that does. The right of exit is often far more important than the right of voice, and federation offers a practical way to exercise the right of exit without surrendering access to the broader ecosystem. Democracy is not distributed governance. It's centralized governance that just allows for some form of (often performative and ineffective) input from those subject to its rules. If everyone involved has the capacity to choose or create their own "little fiefdom", that is a far better outcome than centralized democracy which offers little or no practical right of exit.
- fellowniusmonk 2y ago
  I think you over estimate federation, I started and ran a federated wiki and it's attached company in ~2008-2014 for a particular niche because I am very pro-federation but it's not a panacea and can lead to generally worse alignment with reality. This is like a monolith vs micro services debate all over again and it shares a lot of the same issues and tradeoffs since we're talking about network efficiency, validation, throughput and error handling in systems generally. Federation fosters fragmentation and discovery issues that means unless you have a "reality reification" process a centralized but transparent and public system sees very little benefit from federation. Having a trusted (due to transparency, not perfection in data) and transparent centralized source that trends towards "true" is almost always more efficient than federation, but people seem to hate the idea of rules of governance, this makes sense, as anyone who for whatever reason disagrees with the content on wikipedia will push for fragmentation to push their position closer to the mainstream (which may very well be "more true" for a specific topic) even if the fragmentation damages accurate mapping to a shared reality in general. That's why good governance processes must include "dissent from dissenters in their own words". We must have a "good enough" in content and accuracy system that is the globally agreed on place for us to "fight" over propositions, this allows us to all be on the same page even if we disagree and to share a map of the disagreement space. Independence is not the same as governance, they are orthogonal and people who conflate this clearly haven't thought this through. Just look at denominations and churches for historical repercussions of the different approaches towards governance, excepting a very narrow subset of polity beliefs if you go to attend a "baptist church" or "bible church" you have NO CLUE what they believe or even if they are in fact a koolaid drinking death cult. I think this is good but it is very inefficient, so even in these types of denominations groups will join "conventions" to signal their belief... even then it's buyer beware. There are a lot of young earth creationists, flat earthers and corporate and political shills of various stripes who sounds plausible to those ignorant of the subject who HATE wikipedia. This hate is a sign of a generally healthy ecosystem. I think a lot of people and state actors are incentivized to denigrate anything "imperfect but auditable" as being bad, the simple fact is that humanity needs "Trusted" sources, not in the sense that they are perfect or accurate but in the sense that this platforms goal is "we're trying to align with reality as hard as possible" and we have a globally recognized and shared space to do so, which means dissenting voices will be observable in Talk pages and we ultimately have a jumping off point that has a "shared nomenclature/history" people can fight over. People assume small players are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Some people assume contrarians are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Big is not inherently more evil than small. Transparency is the core to error correction either way. Most federated systems as implemented today seem to reject transparency outright which is totally screwed up and worse than a "open" centralized system.