Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation.
At some point, everything converges to centralization.
No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that.
There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization.
Hell, I would even say that threads is the biggest mastodon instance.
E-mail is really ingenious. It doesn't even define how to send and receive messages in the same standard. One standard is just for delivering messages; you have to figure out how you're going to receive them separately.
Of course most people have an e-mail address hosted by one of a handful of large companies. But you don't have to. And if you buy your own domain, changing providers is easy. Delete your old mail on the old server, upload it to the new server, people can still contact you the same way they did before.
I'm not on social media, so I don't have any dog in this fight. But all the properties of a good decentralized/federated platform are already there in decades-old protocols.
> Hell, I would even say that threads is the biggest mastodon instance.
So is Truth Social. But they are not federated with the rest.
The very second most people need to think about implementation details, like what instance is connected to what instance and what that means, they're done. It's not like they couldn't understand it if they tried: they don't want to try because they don't care. In fact, they don't want to care.
What they care about is interacting with their friends and family and celebrity personas that amuse them, and also get some news handed to them that fits their world view. They don't want to have a little independent social network-- they want to connect with whoever they want to connect with and access whoever they want to access and any barrier to that makes it worse for them. The centralization is the selling point for a lot of those people. Being at the terminal point in a federated service, as they exist, makes all of that harder. It makes it harder for great reasons but they're reasons that most people don't even want to care about. They trade good, easy experiences with the things that are important to them for things they never wanted and have no interest in learning about. Nerds get a kick out of being on a decentralized social network. Most people absolutely do not care. It's not like they don't want to be: it just doesn't matter to them, so if they have to give literally anything up to achieve that, it's too high of a cost.
It's almost like trying to get people to switch from mobile phones to amateur radio.
The chicken and egg problem is that users go where the content is, and content goes where users are.
In reality what this means is that the vast majority of both users and content tend towards a single solution, and that is where there is the least friction, aka the path of least reesistance.
Monetary incentives and various perks (features, first mover advantage, ...) can help but overall it seems to tend towards ease of use.
For users, TikTok is the king for a reason: EVERY SINGLE SWIPE (caps because I want to intentionally put a LOT of emphasis on this) is content that YOU, specifically YOU, are likely interested in. If not, the very next swipe is likely to be what your brain thinks is good, because the algorithm is so good it already knows what you want. Yeah, I know, that's because they spy on their users, whatever, sadly users do not care about that.
BlueSky? Even if you follow specific users, content discovery is so, so much harder. But the main problem is that the vast majority of users, especially new ones, will be subjected to subpar content compared to other platforms.
So why should a new user come back there instead of literally anywhere else? And if there are no users, why put the content there, and if there is no content, there are no users, and so on...
Notice how in all of this the underlying architecture has quite literally no relevance and is nothing but a technical detail.
Perhaps the idea of decentralization was incorrect to begin with, an NI hallucination - perhaps it should be all about centralization-hopping instead. I believe this is what Nostr aims for, though I've never used it.
In the real world, you can ask people if they would prefer to live in a town with all bespoke mom'n'pop businesses or just a few big box retailers and chain restaurants identical to the ones in the next town over. The intuitive expectation might be that most people would prefer the bespoke stuff because it offers a more personalized service, but it turns out that many people really do want to have the same experience as folks in the next town over. Even among folks who claim to be free thinkers or unique personalities, even among folks who have xenophobia or express a chavinistic sentiment, there is still an impulse to seek the exact same experiences that folks outside of their community are also having. Why is that?
I am sure there are various psychological and perhaps even physiological reasons why people are drawn to homogeneity, but the bigger problem is that bad actors can find ways to exploit these reasons to amass power. Once those actors have the power to shape society, then it becomes a feedback loop where perhaps in the abstract a person might not desire exactly those experiences that are provided by the central authority, but because the structures in society are now pointing toward that being the "best" option, then that's what people come to believe they want.
I suppose the philosophical question is if people come to want to be exploited, is it still okay to exploit them? Personally I think it's not okay. I think it's a worthy goal to present other options. In an ideal world, perhaps there would be structures in society that define open standards that allow people to find the homogeneous experiences they value while still ensuring that no central authority could take ownership over the delivery of those experiences. Perhaps there should be some assurance that those who deliver the experiences aren't also using other levers at their disposal to engineer the desire for those experiences in the first place.
Which is all to say that perhaps social media should be better regulated, and as nerds we might think that one way to do that is build it into the base technology as decentralization or federation. But one would hope that people outside of tech could at least understand the value, since the tech is just a model of real-world systems.
There is a group of people that care and use it and it works well.
One argument could be made here that decentralization also means that there will be variety of different protocols and solutions and that's ok.
People outside tech very much do care about the effects of centralization, though. They complain about it constantly, in oblique terms.
All the waxing poetic about "social media"? They aren't mad that people talk to each other. They're mad at platforms.
They just don't recognize the root cause of their pain points until they're sufficiently technical.
Maybe social media is like business.
The crux is that most "decentralized" platforms don't offer long-term solution either. The whole concept of Federation only works as long as everybody is nice to each other, once that stops happening or bus-factor kicks in, you are back to all the problems of centralization and lock-in, since everybody is a user on a server they don't control. It's really no different from early Twitter or Reddit days when everything was nice and open until it suddenly wasn't.
Platforms that are actually build for true decentralization, where the user owns everything and the server owns nothing (public key crypto + dumb relay servers), are still extremely rare. Nostr is one that seems to be on the right track, but that's about the only one I can think of.
I don't see how it can be true. Is everybody nice to each other on the Internet? On Mastodon, disagreements lead to independent islands not federating with each other, which is fine, too.
For most part, yes. ISPs still carry traffic as is and don't just block random hosts because they don't like them. This is however slowly changing in Europe due to ever increasing censorship and age verification. The Great Firewall of China hasn't been nice either. And Claudflare has also become rather annoying with its constant never ending CAPTCHAs.
> On Mastodon, disagreements lead to independent islands not federating with each other, which is fine, too.
How is that different from Twitter, Facebook or any other centralized service? All of them are just independent island that don't federate with each other. If that's ok, what problem is federation solving exactly?
To me the goal of decentralization is "Get rid of the middle man between me and my audience". Federation ain't doing that, it puts far too much control in the hands of the server.
1. You can make your own server federating with anyone you want. This achieves your goal, doesn't it? And, like everything, it has its cost.
2. You can freely move between the islands. Keeping the essentials like followers, known structure of the system. This forces the servers to compete and prevents creation of walled gardens and enshittification like with Twitter and Facebook.
Same effects work in the Internet itself, which made it survive to a large degree free to this day. Facebook and Twitter, as you noticed are those similar islands. Mastodon achieves a similar, decentralized structure on a lower level, increasing the resilience further and making it easier to move between the islands and create your own one.
Decentralization obviously doesn't on its own protect anything from the governments, but it helps.
Running a server isn't practical for average people. It's also nothing new, people could do since the dawn of the Internet, they don't need a Fediverse for that.
> You can freely move between the islands.
I can freely move between Facebook and Twitter too. Again, not seeing what the Fediverse is doing here for me. The Fediverse does not prevent walled gardens, the federation is an optional server-provided feature that can be switched off any time they want. You can't even move your data from one server to the other unless both servers cooperate.
And Lemmy specifically isn't even GDPR compliant, there is no way to export my comments in the UI. There are also other huge issues such as message-ids being tied to the server, so you can't even resolve a URL from one server with another (something Usenet did better 40 years ago, which is why I can still find old post today).
> Mastodon achieves a similar
If Mastodon decides to run ads and enshittify, it's just like Twitter again. There is nothing to prevent that, outside of being small and unpopular.
> Decentralization obviously doesn't on its own protect anything from the governments, but it helps.
I am not worried about the government, I am worried about overzealous mods and server admins, who are already running rampant on the Fediverse and the Fediverse provides no infrastructure to help me here. That's an area where I much prefer Twitter and Co., they are pretty hands-off with moderation as long as you don't violate the law. On the Fediverse thought-policing is getting sold as a feature.
There is not entity "Mastodon" that could decide anything. It's like saying "if the Internet decides to show you ads". It's a meaningless phrase.
> there is no way to export my comments in the UI
It's just a technical, UI problem, which anybody can solve, as it's free software.
> Running a server isn't practical for average people.
This is not the point. Like with repairs, you don't have to know how to do it to benefit from the right to repair. You can pay anybody in the free market to do your repairs or set up a Mastodon (or web) server for you. This solves the monopoly problem even for ordinary people. This is why you need free software btw - and it's not the case with Facebook or Twitter. You can't freely move between them. Once you leave them, you loose all your followers and specific features.
> That's an area where I much prefer Twitter and Co., they are pretty hands-off with moderation as long as you don't violate the law
This is not even funny. Twitter promotes nazi content according to the latest investigations.
mastodon.social is a server, if you have an account on there, they can delete it. If you don't have an account there, they can still block you by defederating whatever server you are on. This is no different from Twitter and Co. Simply put, look at this from an angle when it goes wrong, not when they go right.
> It's just a technical, UI problem, which anybody can solve, as it's free software.
No, that's a fundamental problem with how the data is organized and distributed. Without cryptographic signatures and unique message-ids, you are slave to the server, even if you get the data out of the server, there is no way to get it up on another. To see how broken the situation is just look at the URLs:
- https://feddit.org/post/18147843 - https://lemmy.zip/post/47572103
Can you tell that both are referring to the same post? Can you find the feddit.org post on lemmy.zip when feddit.org goes down? This is not a simple "we'll implement that later"-feature, but a fundamental oversight in how data and control gets handled in the Fediverse. That it violates European law, that explicitly exists to empower the user, ain't helping.
> This is why you need free software btw
Free Software is completely irrelevant here. This is about protocols, data ownership and control, areas that no Free Software license even touches on. It's somewhat ironic that GDPR got there first with actual law, while the Free Software world still completely fails to address those issues, despite them being around for 20 years.
> You can pay anybody in the free market to do your repairs or set up a Mastodon (or web) server for you.
Which is worthless, since the value is in the users and their connections, which are under the control of whoever is running the popular instances, not me.
> You can't freely move between them.
I can freely switch between facebook.com or x.com in my browser just fine.
> Once you leave them, you loose all your followers and specific features.
Yes, that's just the same on the Fediverse. When feddit.de went down, where did my data go? My feddit.de account doesn't work on other servers. feddit.org was recreated from scratch and everybody had to move over manually. Account migration requires two cooperating servers, which you don't have if one of them is down permanently.
> This is not even funny. Twitter promotes nazi content according to the latest investigations.
As said "On the Fediverse thought-policing is getting sold as a feature."