this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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In opposition to this post ... Name your most favorite upsides of software being federated.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well, these don't really apply to Lemmy or fediverse microblogging, but interoperability and censorship resistance. These mostly apply to things like XMPP and standards of federation that are widely adopted.

Im honestly not a fan of federation the way Lemmy and mastodon and the like do it, because the servers aren't really communities truly, theyre interchangeable choke points in an amorphous blob. The servers are just there because that's how they built it and aren't really a positive with regard to UX. But, in a system where different servers focus on themselves first, like forums for example, where the users primarily use them to interact on their server, federated architectures enable communication between these communities and that's great. That's how I use Lemmy; I'm primarily on the server I want to use and interact on, and I venture out and engage with others on other servers, but that's not how most people use it, they just pick a server and everything after the @ is meaningless, they're here for the network, and a federated model is not conducive to good UX if the network is the draw.

For things like the fediverse and threadiverse as it's been named, where the network itself is the draw and not the server in particular, I much prefer a nostr like architecture where the servers have little to no bearing on participation and just relay posts and other interactions.