3 ms·

At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net neg

by akho 10mo ago

At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net negative for that.

owisd 10mo ago
The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.
- akho 10mo ago
  So did forums, even with no federation.
riffraff 10mo ago
Federation is good if you want to stay within a community but also have a chance to interact with others. I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice.
- akho 10mo ago
  Why not several identities, and aggregation in the client? You seem to need to be in the community to fully interact with it on Mastodon, anyway.
incompatible 10mo ago
You'd have to have a lot of trust that the one instance wouldn't get enshittified and end up as another X / Truth Social / BlueSky. Different instances can also have different rules, different moderation and different federation. Edit: and exist in different legal jurisdictions, and also be harder to ban or regulate.
- akho 10mo ago
  Having many instances is not the same as federation.
  - incompatible 10mo ago
    Isn't one a subset of the other? A system with federation must have multiple instances, but a system with multiple instances doesn't need to federate (in the sense of information passing between independently managed instances.)
    - akho 10mo ago
      Yes. My original question was whether federation is necessary for the kind of communities Mastodon serves, not whether the web must have multiple websites.

3 ms·

At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net neg

by akho 10mo ago

At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net negative for that.

owisd 10mo ago
The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.
- akho 10mo ago
  So did forums, even with no federation.
riffraff 10mo ago
Federation is good if you want to stay within a community but also have a chance to interact with others. I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice.
- akho 10mo ago
  Why not several identities, and aggregation in the client? You seem to need to be in the community to fully interact with it on Mastodon, anyway.
incompatible 10mo ago
You'd have to have a lot of trust that the one instance wouldn't get enshittified and end up as another X / Truth Social / BlueSky. Different instances can also have different rules, different moderation and different federation. Edit: and exist in different legal jurisdictions, and also be harder to ban or regulate.
- akho 10mo ago
  Having many instances is not the same as federation.
  - incompatible 10mo ago
    Isn't one a subset of the other? A system with federation must have multiple instances, but a system with multiple instances doesn't need to federate (in the sense of information passing between independently managed instances.)
    - akho 10mo ago
      Yes. My original question was whether federation is necessary for the kind of communities Mastodon serves, not whether the web must have multiple websites.