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The Federation Fallacy
(rosenzweig.io)
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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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.