• blank_sl8@lemmy.ml
    21·
    3 years ago

    Lots of good points here. I haven’t seen any successful federated platforms. One important thing the author forgets to mention is that these “centralized democratic systems” must be open source and self-hostable, which helps to keep their operators on their toes knowing that they are replaceable.

  • obsolete29
    1·
    3 years ago

    Loved reading this and I think she makes some great points.

    How do you go from information anarchy to information democracy though? Wikipedia came into existence so it’s possible but I feel the people with the know how and force of will to do such things are probably going to make themselves rich instead of implementing some sort Wikipedia equivalent of Twitter or Facebook.

    • the_tech_beast@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      3 years ago

      Not much difference in distribution of users. There are a lot more instances to choose from. But a large number of users are on the main instance. For example in the case of mastodon, most of the user base is still on https://mastodon.online and mastodon.social.

      https://matrix.org has the same problem. There are basically millions (I need to find the source for this number, I remember seeing it mentioned somewhere) of users on this instance and not even a number close to this on other servers.

      • Vegafjord eo@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 years ago

        I think we need to emphasize this topic more in digital issues. The matter of decentralization culture within the fediverse. How can we incentivize self hosting?

        I think for example that Small Technology Foundation, Masto Host and Spacebear Federation brings a good impact on this. I think we also need to focus on making it easier for regular people to influence development so that we can better make self hosting accessable.

        • the_tech_beast@lemmy.mlOP
          0·
          3 years ago

          I agree. Currently , self hosting a service is somewhat difficult. It also requires some amount of technical knowledge. Some services can be installed just by entering one command - Nextcloud? While some other services are much more difficult to set up and get it running. Maintaining, updating and backing up is another story and is time consuming.

          Also, not everyone can afford to pay money for hosting an instance.

          I hope more services similar to mastohost will appear and become popular.

  • liminal@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    Very clickbaity title. The article doesn’t conclude federation is bad, just that pursuing the ideal at all costs is a losing battle. Things naturally centralize, so we might as well make the big centre democratic. Wikipedia is fraught with problems and outside influence, but it’s a good example of democratic centralization I guess. Mastodon is still better for allowing federation with the big instances though.