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.
Thanks for your detailed response! There are essentially three approaches that I’ve been taking to try to understand your model. Before that, a quick remark
Given the title of your post, I was assuming that there are platforms that you classify as federated and that you think it is a poor design choice. But I don’t really understand what you mean by that given that your rant includes quite a broad range of topics.
Storage
That I think I understand correctly that it works as a p2p network where everyone seeds a bit of everything. Do users control what part of the network they seed? If yes, then the issue that you might lose your content if someone else (in this case, everyone else) suddenly doesn’t want to share it anymore still exists.
If not, then isn’t any user an accomplice of the diffusion of whatever illegal content circulates? I don’t want to participate is sharing pedopornographic content !
Distribution
Is the app in your model based on an open protocol, that anyone can use to start their own network? Then what happens when people on two such networks try to interact with each other?
It has to be, otherwise it is clearly a centralised network that can be single-handedly shut down by its maintainer.
Network
Logically, the concept of shared blacklist seems to me to be equivalent to federation. If you publicly subscribe to a mod’s blacklist, it’s like if your were joining their instance on the fediverse. If you don’t, it’s like you were creating your own instance, but then you have to implement a blacklist yourself.
I understand the biggest difference is that it’s easier to “start your instance”, but that again implies everyone agrees to seed your content. I would not seed anyone’s content if there is no code of conduct they have to obey. And that seems to logically yield users only seeding content approved by their chosen mods, which brings us back to a federated storage, except that each instance’s data is stored in p2p rather than in a centralized server. But the instance mod still has the same power as in the fediverse case.
So on that classifications comment it’s me not caring about calling a concept something vs discussing what something is already understood as a concept. There is a concept of what federation is, and that is represented in existing federated platforms like lemmy, matrix and so on. In that concept I see stupid things but it’s not all the same nor all of the concept stupid.
So storage on discussions.app is currently using open blockchains. So its the blockchain that is responsible for what is there, while they are only using that for text, blockchains have had childporn put on them. It is next to impossible to remove data from a blockchain. So that is an issue. I think the data would be better stored in something like ipfs. This type of platform relies on the backend for its distributedness, like with a blockchain. Anyone who can access the backend can be part of the platform.
Yes the blacklists would result in a federation of sorts. I think the idea you store and distribute mainly content you use is a good one. The data has to be somewhat unfiltered for the model to work and in that part you will potentially be distributing content you may not want to. Though the situation would be some what a kin to putting encrypted content say here that people wouldn’t like except for the fact they cant know that.