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
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I appreciate the call for democracy, but I think this totally misses the point of federation with it’s complaint that not everybody is going to host their own server. The benefit of federation is not that every individual or small group will run their own server, it’s that there will be multiple server options to choose from so if the one you’re using goes bad you can just switch to another one. Even just getting to an email like system with a few major players and many smaller ones would be a big improvement over a single centralized server, but 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.
They don’t complain that not everybody will host their own server, quite the opposite:
Nor is it enough to “save ourselves”, self-hosting our own decentralised digital islands, while ignoring the reality of the masses. We cannot close our eyes and rest, content with freedom in our personal bubble, ignoring the reality of our non-technical friends and family who do not enjoy the same luxuries of privacy and free speech.
What I think they’re saying is that over time, people gravitate to the biggest instance (which seems to be happening right now with lemmy.world), which can lead to effects that work against the goals of decentralization.
I’m not sure that they are personally advocating for anything particularly precise, but in the end of the article it mentions Wikipedia as an inspiration for the “information democracy” model.
They’re not advocating for federation at all, but their criticism of the fediverse is based on it supposedly falling short of the “dream” that everyone or at least every technically able person will host their own server:
In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom.
Federation is a compromise. Rather than everyone hosting their own systems, ideally every technically able person would host a system for themselves and for their friends, and everyone’s systems could connect. If I’m technically able, I can host an “instance” not only for myself but also my loved ones around me. In theory, through federation my friends and family could take back their computing from the conglomerates, by trusting me and ceding power to me to cover the burden of their system administration.
None of the federated systems mentioned are dominated by one big player, and I don’t see why we should expect that to be the trend.
The article contains a graph showing that (at least at the time it was written) Mastodon was strongly dominated by a single big player, with the top 3 instances holding 50% of users.
Clearly it cannot be dominated by a single big player if you have to add up the top three instances to get to 50% of the users
Maybe I’m not quite following you. Out of 3070 instances, 50% were registered in just the top 3. Whether it’s the top 3 or top 1, doesn’t this clearly show a tendency to cluster into large centralized monoliths? This type of power-law clustering is ubiquitous in all kinds of human behavior, but this would correspond to a really high exponent value for the distribution.
3 is a different number from 1. If a single instance had over 50% of signups it would be reasonable to describe it as dominated by a single big player. If the biggest instance only has 20% or whatever the reality is, then it is not dominated by a single big player.
Definitely there’s a tendency to centralize up from thousands of little shards to a few big professional units - though as we see in every one of these examples, that doesn’t mean the little ones have to disappear. You still have plenty of small email clients and small instances. What’s important is that if one big one goes down or goes evil the other big ones are there, and that there’s always the possibility of new small ones blowing up if they do something better than the big boys.
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.
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.
if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom
I also seem to recall that you need to know how to drive a car in order to operate one safely? Where does this entitlement come from that you shouldn’t need to know anything in order to benefit from the hard work of others?
Anyway, how hard is it to heat up pizza in an oven, to assemble a cake/cookies/etc. from a pre-made mix, or to follow any set of simple instructions really? The bare minimum requirements to get an instance off the ground probably are not all that high, and if there was a demand for such then people could even make installer packages (I would guess that the complexities come from configuration options and such, like which OS are you running, and from maintenance operations, etc., but those too could be streamlined, much easier than making cars self-driving).
Anything is possible, if there is interest in making it happen.
I actually do think it’s messed up that we make the ability to drive a car a prerequisite for living in most of the US - especially since our solution ends up being to make the driving test easy enough for everyone, even unsafe drivers, to pass, and then don’t do anything to make sure people continue to be able to drive safely.
There are no “thoughts” behind that, and anything other than that would be “communism” (actually the word used would be socialism, but that exactly and precisely equals communism by those who would say that, leaving no room at all for interpretation, nuance, or subtlety, most especially how the most revered USA institutions are socialist i.e. sharing like schools, the post office prior to it being crippled 40 some odd years ago, police, firefighters, etc.).
I find it ironic that the situation with Reddit is starting to parallel the decline of US democracy - it’s crumbling, but nobody cares. Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all political - but it’s hard not to when you talk about things like this, b/c that’s what governs our laws, at any scale.
On the one hand, this is indeed what is happening now, the largest instances for lemmy and kbin are taking the vast majority of the new users. I think though that this is because people are signing up before they know what they are signing up for.
I think the point stands that while these large servers can handle the load while still federating fully, it’s not a real problem. The problem with classic centralised systems can be seen with reddit right now. People are leaving because they are enforcing changes on people and there is no alternative. Whereas here, if these larger instances decided to place some draconian measures, people could simply say “no thanks” and sign up elsewhere. That is not compromised by having huge instances. I don’t think these things can end the fediverse though.
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 email123@aol.com to email123@protonmail.com 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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for the clarification!
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.
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
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.
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?
It’s certainly a great read and is worthwhile, however I fundamentally disagree with the base premise that the goal of a federated system is to be uniformly distributed.
Why should an instance focused on a niche topic have the same representation as a general instance? Why should either have the same representation as one with abhorrent content?
Choosing your instance is effectively a statement that you agree with the mission of the particular instance. The number of low user instances demonstrates that there are a great number of people that share the author’s vision of federation.
Because small instances tend to die out in the long run. You can see this with OpenID. OpenID promised us, the users, a way to have one set of credentials to login everywhere. But years later you go to a new site and all you can set are just three options: Facebook, Google and Apple.
Choosing your instance which is not a top dog means that some day you’ll have to migrate. So if you’re smart enough you just sign up for the biggest instance from the start. And that will only speed up the decline of small instances.
Thanks, Obama.
Really intresting rticle
I think the link is broken mate.
I don’t really agree with this article. The argument seems to rest on the idea that a representative democracy is a compromise on direct democracy. In reality, even though I have the ability to meaningfully participate in every election a direct democracy would entail, I have no desire to because I have other things I would rather spend my time doing.
Similarly, even if I have the ability to run my own instance (admittedly I do not, but many of us early adopters do), I do not want to. I’m happy to let other people do it as long as those people seem like broadly agree with my morals. I don’t need an close relationship, just a trustful one. This digital forum inherently has even better benefits than real life; if I realize I dislike my current instance, I have the option to move to another instance or create my own. In real life I can only move to another district or hope to vote out my current rep.
The author seems to be injecting their own version of what they want federated software to be on top of what the fediverse is.
It’s not the panacea that will break the capitalist oligopoly and bring about The Revolution.
It doesn’t require an idealized future where ever person is tech literate enough to host their own email server.
It’s not a system for close friends to congregate in small social circles.
It could be a lot of those things, but the author is projecting. It’s software that is decentralized, can be connected to willing partners, and each instance has the freedom to set their own rules about who they do and don’t communicate with. The author seems to be adding their ideal goal of what the software should be to what it is.
I agree with him that there is inevitably a strong tendency toward centralization, but I think a key feature to help with that would be the portability of one’s account to new instances. Even if the majority of users are in only a few instances, there is still a safeguard against one entity (I.e. corporation) directing the health of the whole system. If accounts were portable, when an instance went foul, people could move and the system as a whole would self-heal.
Nonetheless, it’s an interesting article. And the cost and challenges of running a web scale service are not conducive to small time players.
TIL that WhatsApp internally uses XMPP
Wow this is a great read! I definitely see promise for the described system in the direction we are heading
I didn’t had enough drugs in my system to read everything to the end. Can someone summarize ??
Basically it said to be a true decentralized system people have to be spread equally through the system so the power distribution is equal and not concentrated on one part of the system.
So mastodon is not truly decentralized because a lot of the users are on 3 instances. Also that’s where the fallacy lies - because people choose to be part of the larger instances
As long as the technology is not accessible to everyone from old folks to 5 year olds, the power is concentrated to those who understand and maintain it.
Thank you my friend 👍
