The core phrase of the blog post: “no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions”.
Feels to me that it’s all growing pains, we WOULD benefit for a federated auth system instead of an account on every service, and we need lots of bug fixing, i just wish all these social media shitstorms had happened a couple years later and not at this point…
My simple answer: A centralized body controlling the nature of all traffic on its platform has the power to unilaterally make decisions which benefit the body itself regardless of the needs or desires of the individuals participating on that platform. If there is no centralized body, this is not possible. Because of the multitude of instances and the ability to form barriers between them at will, each community has unprecedented ability to be the platform its users desire it to be.
‘Better’ is relative. To me its better because no one person or group owns or controls the software. There’s no central authority. Don’t like the instance you’re on? Just move to another. Cant find an instance you like? Host your own. Don’t like the path the developers are taking? Fork the code. As long as the very core remains standard (ActivityPub), all possibilities are on.
There needs to be a return to being patient. Most fedi software is not beyond beta yet. They will develop and they will mature but right now the fediverse is a toddler learning to walk. There are issues but with time they’ll get addressed. We’ve all got so addicted to shiny cool apps and services we’ve become prepared to sacrifice our privacy, our choices and our reason at the altar of a quick dopamine hit.
There’s no big money to throw at these issues and therefore no dedicated team. This means solutions come slower. But they will come and they will be motivated by usefulness not profit. The people developing these things have lives and day jobs. Give them time.
no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions
The default example people use for “a federated service” shouldn’t be Mastodon or Lemmy.
It should be email.
Why is it better that different companies, universities, and other organizations (and even hobbyists) can all set up their own email servers, rather than everyone just using (say) Hotmail?
- If Hotmail does something you don’t like, you can switch to Gmail or AOL instead, and you can still send emails to your friends on Hotmail.
- Different providers can specialize in different things, while remaining compatible. Maybe one provider doesn’t prioritize the features you need; but they can’t prevent a competing one from offering them.
- No one provider can impose censorship or other overextended control onto the whole system. No one provider can break the whole system when it has an outage: Hotmail going down does not prevent Gmail’s servers from exchanging messages with the University of Tübingen’s servers.
- Different servers can operate in different parts of the world, under different legal systems. Not everyone is ruled by California or Washington state; or the US. A hobbyist operating an email server in Alabama is not required to comply with Dutch or EU law, and a hobbyist operating an email server in Amsterdam is not required to comply with Alabama or US law. People get to live under the law of their own country; and yet the Alabama mail server and the Amsterdam one can talk to each other.
- The same infrastructure that supports federation also supports extension of the platform. Programmers can build services on top of email, and the medium is transparent to them. And, again, no one provider can tell them “no, you may not build that weird client program, bot, or mailing-list service.” To be honest, you don’t even get Hotmail if email is born as a centralized service. The whole emergence of webmail services could only happen because email is extensible and federated.
I don’t get why we still haven’t figured out that dictatorships are bad.
Reddit is a content dictatorship, federation democratizes it.
It’s really just that simple.
no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions
Uhhh, because if a billionaire with god complex buys an instance, the rot won’t spread to the entirety of Mastodon? Because if an instance decides to start asking exuberant prices to use their API, it won’t spread to the entirety of Lemmy?
The world has shown live and in colors why federation is better, you just haven’t been paying attention.
Considering the current reddit issue, it seems self explanatory why a non centralized solution is better.
I don’t think the interesting issue is why not centralization. There’s tons of better explanations out there, but seriously, just “Elon Musk” is enough to explain why centralization is bad.
But the post does raise an interesting issue IMHO, and it is the lack of good explanation as to why federation between different platforms with different paradigms. Why federation between different Mastodon servers is obvious. Why federation between Mastodon and Calckey and whatever else is obvious too. Same with federation between different Lemmy instances, or between Lemmy and Kbin. It just makes sense. What is not clear is why we want/need/like federation between Lemmy and Mastodon. Sure, you can post in a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but it sucks. You can follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but the experience isn’t great either.
I do think there are good reasons for this, but I haven’t thought enough about it to articulate it properly. My thinking is that while a Mastodon-like service federating with a Lemmy-like service doesn’t seem to make much sense, Mastodon federating with a Facebook-like service does make sense. And I’m not sure if a Facebook-like thing federating with Lemmy makes sense, but I can definitely imagine something sitting somewhere in the middle between those two. And also, perhaps more importantly, we don’t want to erect artificial walls between the different ActivityPub services. Sure, the Mastodon-Lemmy integration sucks, and maybe it shouldn’t exist, but probably nobody will use it much, exactly because it sucks. But if we add a thing saying “no you can’t do it”, then we start needing to define borders between different services. Is microblogging different from blogging? What about a Facebook-like wall? Or a tumblr-like feed? Are those different enough from each other to be different services? Who wants to be the one defining those borders? I think the current solution, where anything is possible and integrations that don’t make sense just don’t happen organically, is the best.
But still, that is a way more itneresting question than just “why federation”.
This article seems needlessly antagonistic. Lemmy and kbin are new software (kbin has been live for about a month). Of course there are incompatibilities right now. Those will be worked out. Also, I’m not really sure which incompatibilities they’re talking about. Lemmy/Kbin posts show up and can be replied to on other fediverse services. you can even create a post in a lemmy community from a microblog acct.
A key thing to remember is that the entire fediverse is built by hobbyists. Gargron and mastodon did a bunch of marketing to get grants/donations but the rest of the fediverse is built by individual people in their free time. Fixing these issues will take much longer than a corporate network would take.
Sidenote: There is no primary fediverse application. I know they meant mastodon because its the most well known but that’s happenstance and bad journalism. Mastodon wasn’t the first fediverse application and I think lemmy/kbin will outgrow it soon.
EDIT: To address OPs callout:
no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions
This feels like the author is ignoring a lot of writing about this. The main argument is its better because you’re not beholden to someone else’s interests, especially corporate interests that will never be aligned with the average user. (See reddit debacle)
Most of the socials that exist on the fediverse are still in beta or even alpha, it seems quite a bit too much to ask for complete federation out of the box. Mastodon gained traction last year, just think of how Facebook or Instagram were in their last first years of development
The Fediverse needs improvements, of course. But it also needs time and resources, and only with patience and coordination (and interest and money) we will get to a perfect working point :)
I like blogs like this. Its important to not stay too comfy in one spot and recognize the flaws in software in order to improve. The comments already try to spot the core issues and offer solutions and its great. I share most of the authors points when it comes to federation. Creating an insta account and sharing your pics on twitter is easy as it gets, you just need two accounts. Im aware this is a growing technology, but I wonder how much of it can be improved, and how much is already set in stone.
It is, of course, odd that the author brushed off descentralization so quickly, especially considering that post was written a couple days ago. Has he not been paying attention to Reddit or Twitter? Sure, if you switch to another instance youll still be under an admin, but you can switch to a saner one. You wont be stuck with the only option. Glad to see this being pointed out in the comment section
The kbin bit is also odd to me. I thought that was just a bug?
Good writeup nonetheless. Wish opinions like this become more common, with the hope that itll be translated into improving the platform
