this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
106 points (94.9% liked)

Fediverse

28733 readers
293 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 [email protected]!

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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
106
The Federation Fallacy (rosenzweig.io)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by BarackObama to c/fediverse
 

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 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah. And I find myself vacillating between agreeing with and disagreeing with the idea of defederation or partial defederation.

I think it requires enlightened admins to walk the line, which is a challenge. Not knocking the folks that run their respective instances, but they are humans who have their own motivations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I feel that I would disagree with it more if it were possible/easy for individual users to block instances they don't want to see

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There's a lot less angst to be had if people could migrate accounts here. Once you have that freedom, it just becomes about respecting freedom of association for admins as well as for users.

If an admin doesn't want to host content coming from another site, that's really their choice. If you want access to it, you have the choice to move to another site.

And that choice becomes a lot more palatable if you can move easily with minimal losses.

[–] OasissisaO 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly.

So you find an instance you love, with a federation philosophy you agree with, and build up a brand (for lack of a better word) there.

What happens when that philosophy either changes or allows the instance to become something different than what originally appealed to you? Do you suck it up and stay or try to create a new presence elsewhere with minimal damage?