104
The Federation Fallacy (rosenzweig.io)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by BarackObama@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

An interesting article I saw (from 2019) describing the potential intrinsic tendency for decentralized platforms to collapse into de facto centralized ones.

Author identifies two extremes, "information dictatorship" and "information anarchy", and the flaws of each, as well as a third option "information democracy" to try and capture the best aspects of decentralization while eschewing the worst.

Someone said the link is broken so here it is: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] OasissisaO@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] psychothumbs@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] OasissisaO@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] psychothumbs@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
104 points (95.6% liked)

Fediverse

28353 readers
204 users here now

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

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS