4 ms·

> Why Federation Must Die I disagree so much. Yes Federation is hard and it brings lots of new challenges. But with things like Chatcontrol it's the only way w

> Why Federation Must Die I disagree so much. Yes Federation is hard and it brings lots of new challenges. But with things like Chatcontrol it's the only way we can continue to communicate securely in the EU. Everything that is not federated has a single entity managing it which can be threatened with punitive actions. With federation everyone can run their own server meaning too many people to go after. I understand these guys don't want it and they have good reason but federation in general should not die.

lucideer 9mo ago
It sounds like you haven't read the article. They're advocating for fully decentralised protocols over federated ones.
- wkat4242 9mo ago
  Fair enough I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing through, just had to skim eg the Matrix criticism. But if it's completely decentralised, why are there servers that must be paid? Anyway I'll read it tonight when I have more time.
  - lucideer 9mo ago
    It seems to be relay servers as far as I can tell.
ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago
Same. Also, see how cool Mastodon is. Sure, it has technical problems, for example discoverability is harder. But so what? Preventing centralization of control is more important than more mundane things like "discoverability". And in fact, discoverability on Mastodon is only less immediate because you don't a central authority making these decision for you. Nothing prevents you from checking out someone who follows and see who follows them and who they follow. It's more work, but you end up with a better result. People who says "discoverability on Mastodon is difficult" presumably also say "I don't want to have to decide who my friends are, I want a corporation to choose my friends for me"...?
- jdgoesmarching 9mo ago
  My friends are in real life, not on Mastodon or Bluesky. Not everyone interested in doing detective work to find accounts related to their interests. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect social media platforms to help with that discovery. If preventing centralization is important to you, then you should care about the product experience of the decentralized platforms.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago
    > Not everyone interested in doing detective work to find accounts related to their interests. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect social media platforms to help with that discovery. In that case you're just using these platforms for free entertainment in exchange for being advertised to. That's ok, but that use case is already solved by facebook, instagram, and twitter, better than Mastodon.
- JuniperMesos 9mo ago
  Mastodon doesn't do enough to prevent centralization of control - when you make an account to use the network, you're making that account on some specific server. This ties your ability to communicate on the network under that identity both to the server operator, and to the domain name of the server. A fediverse server can go down because its maintainers deliberately shut it down or lose interest and stop maintaining it; a domain name can be lost or taken by a government (see the queer.af debacle). The administrators of a fediverse server can also decide to censor your posts or remove your account if they don't like what you post - and it's hard to argue that they don't have the right to do so because they're the ones running the server and storing your account as a row in their database. If you run your own single-user fediverse server, you are the admin yourself so most of these aren't problems (although you still don't control your domain name). But it's difficult for most people to maintain their own social media server, so most people don't do this, meaning that they are still subject to the petty tyranny of their social media provider. It's just that instead of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, it's whatever random person runs the server that they randomly picked to put their account on.
  - 9mo ago

lucideer 9mo ago

It sounds like you haven't read the article. They're advocating for fully decentralised protocols over federated ones.

wkat4242 9mo ago
Fair enough I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing through, just had to skim eg the Matrix criticism. But if it's completely decentralised, why are there servers that must be paid? Anyway I'll read it tonight when I have more time.
- lucideer 9mo ago
  It seems to be relay servers as far as I can tell.

ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago

Same. Also, see how cool Mastodon is. Sure, it has technical problems, for example discoverability is harder. But so what? Preventing centralization of control is more important than more mundane things like "discoverability". And in fact, discoverability on Mastodon is only less immediate because you don't a central authority making these decision for you. Nothing prevents you from checking out someone who follows and see who follows them and who they follow. It's more work, but you end up with a better result. People who says "discoverability on Mastodon is difficult" presumably also say "I don't want to have to decide who my friends are, I want a corporation to choose my friends for me"...?

jdgoesmarching 9mo ago
My friends are in real life, not on Mastodon or Bluesky. Not everyone interested in doing detective work to find accounts related to their interests. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect social media platforms to help with that discovery. If preventing centralization is important to you, then you should care about the product experience of the decentralized platforms.
- ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago
  > Not everyone interested in doing detective work to find accounts related to their interests. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect social media platforms to help with that discovery. In that case you're just using these platforms for free entertainment in exchange for being advertised to. That's ok, but that use case is already solved by facebook, instagram, and twitter, better than Mastodon.
JuniperMesos 9mo ago
Mastodon doesn't do enough to prevent centralization of control - when you make an account to use the network, you're making that account on some specific server. This ties your ability to communicate on the network under that identity both to the server operator, and to the domain name of the server. A fediverse server can go down because its maintainers deliberately shut it down or lose interest and stop maintaining it; a domain name can be lost or taken by a government (see the queer.af debacle). The administrators of a fediverse server can also decide to censor your posts or remove your account if they don't like what you post - and it's hard to argue that they don't have the right to do so because they're the ones running the server and storing your account as a row in their database. If you run your own single-user fediverse server, you are the admin yourself so most of these aren't problems (although you still don't control your domain name). But it's difficult for most people to maintain their own social media server, so most people don't do this, meaning that they are still subject to the petty tyranny of their social media provider. It's just that instead of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, it's whatever random person runs the server that they randomly picked to put their account on.
- 9mo ago