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> [federation] offers a degree of censorship resistance, as the messages or images are replicated across multiple servers, making it difficult for any single en
by ezst 10mo ago
> [federation] offers a degree of censorship resistance, as the messages or images are replicated across multiple servers, making it difficult for any single entity to censor or control the content.
That's the way Matrix goes, but that's not an inherent property of federation (XMPP doesn't leak nearly as much metadata as Matrix does, for instance)
Also, there is no free lunch in this space: p2p is slow and inefficient (bandwidth as much as battery) for modern mobile usecases, the workarounds generally consist of having edge servers to act as caches or preferred routing points, and that brings us back to the exact same set of tradeoffs found in the federation model, except with less control.
In short, I agree with the premise that Matrix is terrible, but not that federation is necessarily bad, nor that P2P is clearly superior.
- pmlnr 10mo agoEmail itself is federated. Sort of the original federated messaging.
- tptacek 10mo agoAnd the worst available secure messaging system.
- pmlnr 10mo agoAnd it's the best widely available, accessible, battle hardened, omnipresent messasing system.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- leetnewb 10mo agoWhat do you think of a system like Delta Chat built on top?
- akerl_ 10mo agoTrying to build a secure system on top of email is a waste of time and energy. Even if you succeeded, it would only be by compromising all the things that make email useful.
- BlueTemplar 10mo agoIt cannot be the worst when it's not one.
- HNisCIS 10mo agoI'll preface by saying that I would prefer fully decentralized/p2p systems to take over, that's said... Their arguments against the middle ground (federation) made no sense. Yes, some current implementations are flawed in that you can poison caches with spam and csam, but that's not inherent to federation. In fact, it looked more like they were upset that you can't censor federated communities sufficiently to their liking (nuke them out of existence on a whim?). Their main, and really only, argument against Lemmy was group think but...it's a consensus platform, that's its purpose. There is a time and place for communities to build group consensus organically and it's a viral part of society, so while I can understand chafing at that from time to time, I wouldn't call it a protocol failure.