If the problem with federated networks is that they can't be globally censored to your (and Coraline Ehmke's) standards, I think I will continue to use them.
With Federated networks you can block an entire domain, so if you don’t like seeing it you don’t have to- but if you do want to talk about taboo subjects you can in your own space.
“Fediverse” tools are a bait and Switch. I don’t need a glorified Wordpress blog that has elaborate censorship tools built into it. Networks like Mastodon also won’t implement E2E encryption because it would throw a wrench into their ideological crusade. Sounds like exactly the kinds of people I don’t want to associate with.
I can run my own web server, serve millions of users, and provide an RSS feed with technology from 10+ years ago. The Internet is Federated by design and it works fine for me.
Others covered some other points, but one of my major motivators is the issue of centralization: the world has come to depend on this single organization (much like Facebook) that not only oversees all of this data, but can impose whatever type of censorship or manipulation they want on users. Intentional or not.
I use GNU Social[0], which is a federated service. I also host it myself, so I'm in complete control of my data. Because it's federated, the instance of anyone following me (or following others that repeat my messages) also have a copy of my messages, and I others; this makes censorship effectively impossible. In fact, it has some interesting side-effects: recently an instance dedicated to hosting pornographic material was federated with popular instances, which made many people uncomfortable; in that case, it's up to the individual instance to decide what to do (e.g. block the posts in the global feed).
I'm sure the recent controversy surrounding Moxie's opinions on federation with Signal can help put this topic in perspective for many people.
One of the points that Aurynn Shaw makes is that federation hampers the addition of protocol features because new features have to be agreed upon by all participants in the federated network. This adds friction to the evolution of protocols, and results in the phenomenon wherein Slack runs halfway around the world while IRC is still putting on its shoes.
She also makes some excellent points about the social characteristics of federated networks. In a federated environment, each node sets their own policy, which meant there was no single point of responsibility for onboarding new users, setting standards of behavior, or filtering out trolling and harassment. Often, as on USENET and IRC, it is the user's own responsibility to filter out content and users they don't want to see -- and there was no authoritative source for new users to determine who/what should be filtered. Some USENET groups were moderated, and on IRC, channel ops can monitor and ban users for in-channel behavior, but if someone is harassing you in PRIVMSG there's often nothing you can do -- and channel bans can be circumvented and enforcement bots subverted fairly easily. And no one takes responsibility to communicate which instance of a federated network to join if they don't want to see particular kinds of content.
So federated networks quickly become cesspools of the worst forms of communication because they're optimized to promote all forms of communication -- "freedom of speech at all costs" as Aurynn says (and, as she points out, is actually a US-chauvinistic perspective on speech and runs contrary to the laws on speech even in most democratic countries -- hate speech being an offense is the norm). This tends to make them grognard-friendly, but hostile to new users and to users of marginalized communities, as well as potentially illegal to participate in in countries not called the USA. And that was accepted in the 90s internet because that's how the 90s internet was. But standards have changed and this is no longer acceptable. "Me too" has gone from the mark of a clueless n00b to a rallying cry against harassment. And people like Aurynn Shaw and Coraline Ada Ehmke have been leading the way in terms of calling out and removing the negativity, exclusion, and sometimes outright hate, from open source development communities with things like Coraline's code of conduct and Aurynn's efforts to highlight contempt culture -- the "PHP sucks" and "Micro$oft sucks" culture that prevailed in technical circles in the 90s and early 00s whose toxicity is something we still deal with today.
Times have changed since federation came out and was promoted as a wonderful thing. Back in the 90s, we thought that building the technology itself was sufficient to change the world for the better. Today we understand better the social costs that mentality has unleashed. We optimize for creating safe, welcoming communities and promoting voices that are usually silenced, rather than allowing everyone to communicate anything at any time. Unfortunately, federated technologies as we understand them today still come from that 90s mentality, and without broader conversations about the social impacts -- as well as establishing some sort of standards for mitigating those impacts -- it's simply better to not federate. Slack and Discord are easier to get started with, offer more features, and promote a safer and more welcoming environment than does IRC.
Sure, but that wouldn't have prevented the "cancer" from moving to decentralized networks. If anything it'd probably accelerate the process.
I think the important point is that most operators of nodes on a federated network are not in a position to benefit from this kind of garbage content, and have every reason (and the tools they need) to keep it away from their portion of the network.
I would still disagree with this - federated decentralized services (think Mastadon, or PeerTube) are made up of smaller nodes. Each of those nodes are more tightly policed by smaller communities, and you subscribe to a subset of those communities that you care about.
This is great for moderation - Mastadon instances tend to be very focused and to ban bad actors quickly. It's bad for content discovery, because not all of the content is localized in one place.
It's a tradeoff, one that I'm increasingly suspecting is inherent to the debate over centralization, and one that I think might end up being a deciding factor for people choosing which direction they support. If you care about mass indexing and content discovery, maybe you just can't have moderation. If you care about moderation, maybe you just can't have content discovery or mass indexing.
Granted, decentralization is worse for censorship because bad actors can go off and make their own instance, and other people can still subscribe to them. But, censorship != moderation, those are two entirely different concepts that just occasionally overlap with each other.
This is assuming that you're talking about moderation that's more in-depth than just adding a captcha to defeat spammers. With the example you gave of hosting your own fileshare; Facebook has more resources to deal with a certain kind of attack - DOS, XSS, etc... but you're really only talking about a very small subset of attack patterns in that instance. I think federation makes most of those problems go away, because you can standardize purely technical defenses and for the most part they scale just fine across decentralized services.
The moment you start talking about hard problems of moderation like choosing which files you're going to host in the first place, the private SMTP server wins.
When I think about scaling moderation and curbing abuses, I'm not really thinking about the low hanging fruit, I'm thinking about curbing bad actors who are already actively participating on the platform, or who are coming up with novel attacks that don't have any one-size-fits-all solutions.
I disagree. I believe that the biggest blocker for federated social networks would be the lack of "good" censorship for things like spam, terrorism propaganda, child porn, etc. I don't want to use a social network and have to deal with that in my timeline.
Think of what you're saying. You're saying you want someone else to curate the feed from which you curate your feed.
The federated feed is noisy, just like the real world. You pick from it and decide what you interact with. Letting someone decide what you see there, it doesn't lessen the SNR, it just lessens what you see. For every hentai bot you don't see there is at least one real person with something interesting to say that you'll never see.
I prefer to decide what information is available to me, and that necessarily means wading through things I'm not interested in sometimes.
We need to think federation here. Some websites have more racist content. Some have more porn. We can choose to visit a website which sorry suits our sensibilities. That's not the case with a social network. They have to apply one set of policies to all. The problem though is that there is no business model that supports federated social networks.
The community should probably spend less time complaining about how existing centralized social networks are abusive, and spend more time developing, using and promoting federated alternatives. The fact that you have to use the one that everyone else uses is not a universal truth but a regrettable state of affairs which should be fixed.
Would adding federation to Signal help with users behind country-wide blocks? Seems like a distributed service would be harder to censor than a centralized one.
Decentralized/federated sharing doesn't eliminate censorship, it democratizes it. This relates to the censorship / moderation distinction.
When it is your community making the choices about what is considered acceptable, that sort of community moderation is essential to a well functioning online community. When an external entity is imposing standards on your community, that is considered censorship.
The line between these two can be super fuzzy and arbitrary, but that doesn't mean that this distinction doesn't have real value to those who make that distinction.
The impetus towards federation is because people want their communities to be able to set their own standards rather than having to abide by whatever decisions Facebook/Apple/Google/Twitter et al make.
Edit: For example, HN is has some significant moderation. I believe the vast majority of the HN community think that this moderation is not only beneficial but crucial to the community. If the HN moderators lost the respect/buy-in/consent of their community then this would start to be viewed as censorship.
I've decided to filter out stuff on mastodon because what I saw was way too obnoxious for my taste. And trying to look up at federated timeline was like travelling via some porn-driven twitter fork.
It feels like filters not only limited content for me but also magically limited my profile visibility because of these filters which should be in theory private.
The idea of federated services, social media is great but for me at the moment, it doesn't feel like content is different - only the means of delivering it were changed.
I really think that open source federated services are the future. There are now a bunch of these services all using the same protocol called ActivityPub. PeetTube is a YouTube alternative, PixelFed replaces instagram, Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit, and Plume is like medium. There are a few other projects as well. All of these services are able to talk to each other and allow users to share data across them creating one large federated platform. Meanwhile, traditional commercial platforms like Fb, Twitter, and Youtube have zero incentive to allow users to move data between them.
Another important aspect of the Fediverse is that it's much harder to censor and manipulate than centralized networks. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries.
A federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit is the way internet was intended to work in the first place before it was hijacked by corporations. I'm very glad to see that decentralized networks are finally starting to get popular again.
The idea behind federated networks is to spread power.
If power is truly spread out and people there are as heterogeneous as everywhere else it does mean that there will be instances that do not agree on the process on how to handle things. That is by design.
Long term the only one you as a Mastodon user have to agree with is the administrator of your instance. If you are on a mainstream instance where, let's say, zealots push for an ever smaller overton window and isolate the instance you should, ideally, just switch instances as soon as it starts getting in your way.
It is natural that parts of the network will drift in different directions while they iterate on their understanding on how the instance should be governed.
Truly problematic are not instances deciding to go strict but platform providers trying to pressure their vague and intransparent rules onto the network.
... also the ever present risk of software developers adding their own hierarchy to the system, but that problem is inherent to all shared protocols.
Yes, I disagree with the above user's statement about why they're said to be federated- they're federated because content from any instance can appear on any other instance. The federation is the cross-talk.
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