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The Federation Fallacy
(rosenzweig.io)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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They don't complain that not everybody will host their own server, quite the opposite:
What I think they're saying is that over time, people gravitate to the biggest instance (which seems to be happening right now with lemmy.world), which can lead to effects that work against the goals of decentralization.
I'm not sure that they are personally advocating for anything particularly precise, but in the end of the article it mentions Wikipedia as an inspiration for the "information democracy" model.
They're not advocating for federation at all, but their criticism of the fediverse is based on it supposedly falling short of the "dream" that everyone or at least every technically able person will host their own server:
None of the federated systems mentioned are dominated by one big player, and I don't see why we should expect that to be the trend.
The article contains a graph showing that (at least at the time it was written) Mastodon was strongly dominated by a single big player, with the top 3 instances holding 50% of users.
Clearly it cannot be dominated by a single big player if you have to add up the top three instances to get to 50% of the users
Maybe I'm not quite following you. Out of 3070 instances, 50% were registered in just the top 3. Whether it's the top 3 or top 1, doesn't this clearly show a tendency to cluster into large centralized monoliths? This type of power-law clustering is ubiquitous in all kinds of human behavior, but this would correspond to a really high exponent value for the distribution.
3 is a different number from 1. If a single instance had over 50% of signups it would be reasonable to describe it as dominated by a single big player. If the biggest instance only has 20% or whatever the reality is, then it is not dominated by a single big player.
Definitely there's a tendency to centralize up from thousands of little shards to a few big professional units - though as we see in every one of these examples, that doesn't mean the little ones have to disappear. You still have plenty of small email clients and small instances. What's important is that if one big one goes down or goes evil the other big ones are there, and that there's always the possibility of new small ones blowing up if they do something better than the big boys.
Then it seems like we're in agreement. The thrust of the article is not that the fediverse is bad, or that it doesn't improve upon the FAANG cartel model, but rather that decentralization by itself is not a silver bullet. It also needs to include the "bottom-up consensus seeking" that e.g. Wikipedia uses for its decision making.
Yes I get what the article was arguing. My critique is that it doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of the fediverse model, since it thinks there's something problematic about the sizes of instances follows a power distribution and refers to "the federated ideal, where all instances are created equal" in the sense of having the same number of users.
They clearly don't think that, since right after they said:
All of your comments in this thread seem to have been a strong defence against perceived criticisms of the Fediverse, when the article isn't so much criticizing it as it's proposing that it needs additional safeguards (besides decentralization) to ensure it remains aligned with users' interests:
Firstly by alleging that the author advocates everybody running their own instance
Then by nitpicking that massive concentration in 3 instances has totally different implications to concentration in 1 instance
And now alleging that the author only considers Fediverse successful if all instances are the same size.
These are really disingenuous and uncharitable ways to read the article. I'm sure the author has a perfectly good understanding of the concept of Federation, as they detailed several examples, and they have a lot of experience in highly technical computer science work.
I'm fine with criticisms of the fediverse, my issue with this article is how the author repeatedly makes these negative comparisons of the existing fediverse to some 'dream' of what it is supposed to be like that seemingly exists only in the author's own head. You can see in each of my quotes where the author makes claims about how the fediverse should be much more decentralized than it actually is to live up to that dream, even if he doesn't necessarily claim to agree with that dream himself. As to the "does three equal one" question - clearly having three big instances sharing half the space and a long tail of thousands the other half is a very different scenario from having a single dominant instance.
3067 is a lot of ways to slice half a pie. I'd consider even 16.5% (or whatever the top dog of that 3 with 50% has) to be domination.
Hmm domination in what sense? Maybe in terms of winning the competition for biggest instance, but clearly that's not big enough to impose their will on the whole.
It really depends. If you're in a smaller instance and you look at the global view, you're going to see more of Mr. 16.5% than one of the smaller ones.
Though I suspect usage patterns and the way users interact with instances beyond theirs will play a role. But, in an immediate sense, I could see larger instances having a bigger voice (so to speak).
And now I'll waffle and say it's all a crapshoot because people are unpredictable and social media platforms even more so.
I agree large instances have a bigger voice proportional to their larger size, but I don't think that's really an issue as long as there are plenty of instance options and no single one is so powerful it can force the system to conform to it rather than conforming itself to the system.
I also seem to recall that you need to know how to drive a car in order to operate one safely? Where does this entitlement come from that you shouldn't need to know anything in order to benefit from the hard work of others?
Anyway, how hard is it to heat up pizza in an oven, to assemble a cake/cookies/etc. from a pre-made mix, or to follow any set of simple instructions really? The bare minimum requirements to get an instance off the ground probably are not all that high, and if there was a demand for such then people could even make installer packages (I would guess that the complexities come from configuration options and such, like which OS are you running, and from maintenance operations, etc., but those too could be streamlined, much easier than making cars self-driving).
Anything is possible, if there is interest in making it happen.
I actually do think it's messed up that we make the ability to drive a car a prerequisite for living in most of the US - especially since our solution ends up being to make the driving test easy enough for everyone, even unsafe drivers, to pass, and then don't do anything to make sure people continue to be able to drive safely.
There are no "thoughts" behind that, and anything other than that would be "communism" (actually the word used would be socialism, but that exactly and precisely equals communism by those who would say that, leaving no room at all for interpretation, nuance, or subtlety, most especially how the most revered USA institutions are socialist i.e. sharing like schools, the post office prior to it being crippled 40 some odd years ago, police, firefighters, etc.).
I find it ironic that the situation with Reddit is starting to parallel the decline of US democracy - it's crumbling, but nobody cares. Sorry, I didn't mean to get all political - but it's hard not to when you talk about things like this, b/c that's what governs our laws, at any scale.
On the one hand, this is indeed what is happening now, the largest instances for lemmy and kbin are taking the vast majority of the new users. I think though that this is because people are signing up before they know what they are signing up for.
I think the point stands that while these large servers can handle the load while still federating fully, it's not a real problem. The problem with classic centralised systems can be seen with reddit right now. People are leaving because they are enforcing changes on people and there is no alternative. Whereas here, if these larger instances decided to place some draconian measures, people could simply say "no thanks" and sign up elsewhere. That is not compromised by having huge instances. I don't think these things can end the fediverse though.