this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
167 points (97.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43958 readers
2293 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's much less control about the software.
In a federated system you have no control about wheter remote instances are running up-to-date software or even the same type of software (think Lemmy vs Kbin), which makes breaking changes really hard to impossible, since you never know what ancient version another instance might run.
This is part of the reason why e-Mail works the same now as it did in the 80s. If e-Mail was a centralized service, it would be a full communications- and office-suite now, but since it's federated it's still separate messages in folders and stuff like grouping messages by thread are considered innovative.
Pedantic but email is more like a protocol and not a software. Outlook is the software. It's not a valid example.
ActivityPub might be closer
100%
ActivityPub is a pretty bad example, since it's new. It hasn't had to endure decades of implementations and extensions, like email has. But ActivityPub will be an equal mess given enough time.
Anything that has to be backward compatible for too long will become a mess.
Incidentally, this is one of the biggest complaints from a technical standpoint that many people have with certain Microsoft products.