Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.

Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.

  • lemm1ngsOP
    2·
    3 years ago

    Aren’t there blocklists in many p2p networks? I know in bittorrent there are.

    Block lists with torrents were used to try prevent legal implication and a few other reasons all which are largely useless because peers on blocklists can just move to nonblocked ips, especially peers with resources looking to gather evidence.

    My point is that it’s not federation what’s the cause of the “fiefdom” syndrome

    I disagree but it is a point worth exploring. Thinking what would be the cause likely is that the federated instances exert control over the content rather than just storing and relaying it to the users to deal with.

    In theory you could have the same problem in p2p network if a majority of peer nodes applied whitelisting.

    Yes you could but it still depends how the content is distributed, peers on the white list could act as relays to those not on the white list. This would risk them being removed but when dealing with so many peers I just dont see lists like that working to segment the network too much. They may as well fork. The desire to remain connected to the larger network will be too much for most users. You could also have underlying blockchains or hash tables that make forking the network not very promising.

    When hosting publicly you become responsible of the content

    Section 230 and the dmca should still apply, enforcing becomes much harder with p2p but so does defending I think the legal system does make having free speech an interesting problem inspite that the constitution says it should be possible. I think having speech government and companies and many others don’t want is part of the plan for these networks. There is a great many authorities not happy at the freedoms the internet has allowed.

    Torrents have problems when there’s not enough peers, there’s a lot of dead torrents out there showing this.

    Yes but I think keeping the text part of these platforms alive should be much easier. Torrent only needs 1 peer(seed) with a full copy, a social network can easily have 50000 users which is a lot of resistance and redundancy.

    • Ferk
      3·
      3 years ago

      Block lists with torrents were used to try prevent legal implication and a few other reasons all which are largely useless because peers on blocklists can just move to nonblocked ips, especially peers with resources looking to gather evidence.

      Same can be applied to federated blocklists. You can just move a server to a nonblocked IP. The only way to truely block content is to use whitelists instead of blocklists.

      Yes you could but it still depends how the content is distributed, peers on the white list could act as relays to those not on the white list.

      Same could be applied to federated servers then. Servers on the whitelist could act as relays to those not on the whitelist.

      Section 230 and the dmca should still apply, enforcing becomes much harder with p2p but so does defending I think the legal system does make having free speech an interesting problem inspite that the constitution says it should be possible.

      This all depends on the country. I know first hand of cases where letters have been sent to particulars in P2P networks and have been called to court.

      a social network can easily have 50000 users which is a lot of resistance and redundancy

      This is why I’m saying it depends on the case. Those big communities maybe don’t need a dedicated server, but that might not always be the case. I might want to make a private community for my family or a small circle of friends. Much like how I might want to have a Matrix room with a few people that might only come online one at a time.

      • lemm1ngsOP
        3·
        3 years ago

        Good points you make, whitelisting is powerful that way making closed communities. I wonder if lemmy will ever have encrypted communities?

        Funny I just watched you make 2 edits while I was reading which impressed me with lemmy’s update speed. Its making matrix look slow.

        Yes use case is important I think adding features and choice and letting users work it out is a good path. Something good would be serverless communities, matrix needs that for some rooms especially with p2p.