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

Fediverse

28529 readers
654 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
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can’t for email.

Not sure how that works. With emails, if I move from [email protected] to [email protected] I lose my old emails and people trying to contact me there, but I can just start over. If I remember peoples’ emails I can also tell them I moved to protonmail and to talk to me there. With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities; but I can just start over. If I remember people’s usernames and subscribed communities I can tell the people I moved and to talk to me there, and re-subscribe on the new account. Unlike with email I can still see my old account’s comments and posts, but otherwise I’m not sure how moving accounts in the Fediverse is different from changing emails.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities

That is in no way an inherent limitation. It's just a current limitation with Lemmy and kbin.

You can move from one Mastodon instance to another and take your followers and follows with you. And if you move to a Calckey-bases instance, you can even import your old posts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you for the clarification! I don’t use Mastodon because I’ve never really been interested in Twitter, so I was very unaware of that.

[–] Aux 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can actually move your email between services. But that rarely applies to private accounts. Moving business accounts between providers is not a big deal, just takes time to import/export data, which is kinda slow over IMAP.

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

Thank you for the clarification!