kjuh

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck @osma @atomicpoet I totally agree with your analysis, that most people don’t care about decentralisation, BUT that doesn’t make it irrelevant. Most people in russia don’t care about democracy… 😉 We should continue discussing and pushing for decentralisation in the fediverse and democracy in russia nonetheless!

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck @osma Well then I get the feeling this whole discussion is more about semantics, than anything else… Mastodon is one of many implementations of ActivitiPub, which all together make up the decentralised fediverse. This is only possible because decentralisation was a driving factor of the development and a central feature of ActivityPub. Decentralisation is the essence on which the fediverse is built.

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck @osma If most users are on mastodon.social other instance have two choices: 1. defederate them and lose a huge share of the federated community with all the content they create, which could push more users into the centralised server(s) and make zhe fediverse irrelevant; or 2. cooperate with an entity, which works against their ideals (decentralisation and thus containment of power). That’s a huge problem. If you value decentralisation, that is.

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck @osma Ok, swap out mastodon.social for some other name and imagine that „main“ server falling into the hands of someone who does things, that are inacceptable to the (comparably small) rest of the fediverse.

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck @osma Doesn’t really matter. It could actually become a problem without any grossly inacceptable behaviour from the owner. If whoever runs such a huge instance decides to not moderate at all. Radical Free Speech, you know… The whole fediverse would be flooded with all kinds of innaceptable content (misinformation, child porn, violence) and the only choice would be to block the whole instance, including all valuable content on it, or just swallow it.

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck @osma In a more secentralised fediverse, blocking problematic instances would be far easier and less disrupting to the whole community.

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck Or that one instance could be hacked, or the owner could decide to just take it offline. It would be the one single point of failure for a huge part of the community. Which, when lost, would massively impact the (potentially smaller) rest of the decentralised fediverse.

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck Absolutely agree! 🤝 That tradeoff has to be balanced, discussed & checked. We need to appreciate risks and benefits of both approaches. The easiest solution is not necessarily the best & the (de)centralisation debate IMHO is important to keep this balance and to keep pushing for better solutions!

kjuh, 1 year ago

@anderspuck @osma Thing is, your own server with a handful of users isn’t so much of a social network, if a large part of the community suddenly disappears.

kjuh, 1 year ago

@osma @anderspuck It’s never a problem until it suddenly is… So better contain or prevent problems before they become acute.