An interesting article I saw (from 2019) describing the potential intrinsic tendency for decentralized platforms to collapse into de facto centralized ones.

Author identifies two extremes, “information dictatorship” and “information anarchy”, and the flaws of each, as well as a third option “information democracy” to try and capture the best aspects of decentralization while eschewing the worst.

Someone said the link is broken so here it is: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

  • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    They’re not advocating for federation at all, but their criticism of the fediverse is based on it supposedly falling short of the “dream” that everyone or at least every technically able person will host their own server:

    In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom.

    Federation is a compromise. Rather than everyone hosting their own systems, ideally every technically able person would host a system for themselves and for their friends, and everyone’s systems could connect. If I’m technically able, I can host an “instance” not only for myself but also my loved ones around me. In theory, through federation my friends and family could take back their computing from the conglomerates, by trusting me and ceding power to me to cover the burden of their system administration.

    None of the federated systems mentioned are dominated by one big player, and I don’t see why we should expect that to be the trend.

      • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        121·
        1 year ago

        Clearly it cannot be dominated by a single big player if you have to add up the top three instances to get to 50% of the users

          • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
            91·
            1 year ago

            3 is a different number from 1. If a single instance had over 50% of signups it would be reasonable to describe it as dominated by a single big player. If the biggest instance only has 20% or whatever the reality is, then it is not dominated by a single big player.

            Definitely there’s a tendency to centralize up from thousands of little shards to a few big professional units - though as we see in every one of these examples, that doesn’t mean the little ones have to disappear. You still have plenty of small email clients and small instances. What’s important is that if one big one goes down or goes evil the other big ones are there, and that there’s always the possibility of new small ones blowing up if they do something better than the big boys.

              • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Yes I get what the article was arguing. My critique is that it doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp of the fediverse model, since it thinks there’s something problematic about the sizes of instances follows a power distribution and refers to “the federated ideal, where all instances are created equal” in the sense of having the same number of users.

                  • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    2·
                    1 year ago

                    I’m fine with criticisms of the fediverse, my issue with this article is how the author repeatedly makes these negative comparisons of the existing fediverse to some ‘dream’ of what it is supposed to be like that seemingly exists only in the author’s own head. You can see in each of my quotes where the author makes claims about how the fediverse should be much more decentralized than it actually is to live up to that dream, even if he doesn’t necessarily claim to agree with that dream himself. As to the “does three equal one” question - clearly having three big instances sharing half the space and a long tail of thousands the other half is a very different scenario from having a single dominant instance.

            • OasissisaO@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              3067 is a lot of ways to slice half a pie. I’d consider even 16.5% (or whatever the top dog of that 3 with 50% has) to be domination.

              • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Hmm domination in what sense? Maybe in terms of winning the competition for biggest instance, but clearly that’s not big enough to impose their will on the whole.

                • OasissisaO@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  It really depends. If you’re in a smaller instance and you look at the global view, you’re going to see more of Mr. 16.5% than one of the smaller ones.

                  Though I suspect usage patterns and the way users interact with instances beyond theirs will play a role. But, in an immediate sense, I could see larger instances having a bigger voice (so to speak).

                  And now I’ll waffle and say it’s all a crapshoot because people are unpredictable and social media platforms even more so.

                  • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    3·
                    1 year ago

                    I agree large instances have a bigger voice proportional to their larger size, but I don’t think that’s really an issue as long as there are plenty of instance options and no single one is so powerful it can force the system to conform to it rather than conforming itself to the system.

    • OpenStars@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom

      I also seem to recall that you need to know how to drive a car in order to operate one safely? Where does this entitlement come from that you shouldn’t need to know anything in order to benefit from the hard work of others?

      Anyway, how hard is it to heat up pizza in an oven, to assemble a cake/cookies/etc. from a pre-made mix, or to follow any set of simple instructions really? The bare minimum requirements to get an instance off the ground probably are not all that high, and if there was a demand for such then people could even make installer packages (I would guess that the complexities come from configuration options and such, like which OS are you running, and from maintenance operations, etc., but those too could be streamlined, much easier than making cars self-driving).

      Anything is possible, if there is interest in making it happen.

      • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I actually do think it’s messed up that we make the ability to drive a car a prerequisite for living in most of the US - especially since our solution ends up being to make the driving test easy enough for everyone, even unsafe drivers, to pass, and then don’t do anything to make sure people continue to be able to drive safely.

        • OpenStars@kbin.social
          11·
          1 year ago

          There are no “thoughts” behind that, and anything other than that would be “communism” (actually the word used would be socialism, but that exactly and precisely equals communism by those who would say that, leaving no room at all for interpretation, nuance, or subtlety, most especially how the most revered USA institutions are socialist i.e. sharing like schools, the post office prior to it being crippled 40 some odd years ago, police, firefighters, etc.).

          I find it ironic that the situation with Reddit is starting to parallel the decline of US democracy - it’s crumbling, but nobody cares. Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all political - but it’s hard not to when you talk about things like this, b/c that’s what governs our laws, at any scale.