Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago

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Fediverse or Decentralisation? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Fediverse has emerged as the popular choice when people look for Twitter alternatives. Personally I found Mastodon was like the early days of Twitter, without half as much toxicity.

However, Fediverse comprises various instances operated by different people. Users sometimes need to switch between different instances, which can be annoying and challenging to manage effectively. I also feel it lacks the social media vibe.

Similarly, decentralisation, as seen in peer-to-peer networks, also emphasizes privacy and freedom of expression.

While exploring decentralised networks such as Nostr, Scuttlebutt, and WireMin, I found that Nostr has the highest level of recognition, whereas Scuttlebutt and WireMin have relatively small user bases currently. I believe their true value will only surface when they get big in the future. But the question is: will they indeed get big? Will decentralisation actually work?

Will Fediverse be the one to trigger the revolution and replace Twitter or Decentralisation?

What are your thoughts on this matter?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm sorry to say that, but you get you're definition wrong. "decentralized" means "which has no center anymore". ActivityPub is decentralized. The usual criticism of the Fediverse by peer to peer networks such as Secure Scuttlebutt or Dat is not that ActivityPub is not decentralized, but that it will eventually "recentralize", like client/server models tend to do, when one instance capture all the traffic (like Gmail with SMTP, we already see signs of that with mastodon.social, but we're still very far from it to be a center). I think that maybe you've been exposed to that argument and misunderstood it?

What you really want to say is that ActivityPub is not p2p. You can criticize the fact that there is a server/client model behind it, which means that users don't really own their data and can lost it if the server goes down - that's a valid criticism.

To which I would answer that it's a tradeoff. :) ActivityPub is built on top of HTTP, the well known protocol on which the web is built. This makes it dirt simple to build an ActivityPub app. The difference of adoption rate between SSB, Dat or IPFS and ActivityPub has nothing to do with luck. It's HTTP and JSON, it's just simpler (and easier) to build on top of ActivityPub. Not only that, but it's a w3c standard. Which means, for people like me who have been burnt by building apps on top of the Beaker Browser only to see it abandoned, that we can trust there won't be any rug pull. That matters.

And of course, you can also… run your own server (look into self-hosting if you're interested in that, there's a vibrant community here on Lemmy about that). If you run your server, then you own your data and the other servers become your peers. The idea that only others (presumably big companies) can have servers is a very centralized way of thinking.