Are we decentralized yet?

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.

Until the platform enshittifies like Reddit and Twitter did.

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.

It's a wrong interpretation. Since they leave, they obviously care. They just don't know that decentralized platforms offer long-term solution.

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.