I get it that things can have unfortunate names, but I've seen a lot of people proudly claim lemmy is "federated" or a "federation". Isn't a federation actually against what people want out of the fediverse?
Like, a federation in governments is about a bunch of otherwise self-governing states under a centralized government. Like the US, that's a federation.
isn't the whole point of the fediverse that it's anti-centralization? Then why do people call it a federation positively? That sounds like the last thing I'd want it to be.
I think a confederation would work, but that's not what I see people going for. Is that what it's actually intended to be and people just call it the wrong thing?
Imo Reddit is more of a federation than the fediverse, since the subreddits are self-governing communities until the admins demand them to change something.
The "central authority" is not an instance, but the ActivityPub protocol itself. Each instance is federated under ActivityPub, but is otherwise independent with their own platform and rules of interaction.
You're assuming that the word federation means central governance over the component parts. It doesn't. That's just an element that happens to be present in well-known political federations, which are not the only kind.
A federation is a group of computing or network providers agreeing upon standards of operation in a collective fashion.
The term may be used when describing the inter-operation of two distinct, formally disconnected, telecommunications networks that may have different internal structures.[1] The term "federated cloud" refers to facilitating the interconnection of two or more geographically separate computing clouds
You're applying the political science definition of 'federation' and not the computer science definition. They are different. Federation in CompSci terms has to do with networking providers using standardization to interoperate, which is exactly what the fediverse does.
Yeah, someone else already pointed this out to me. All I was aware of (and got from google when checking) was the political definition, so I thought that's all there is to it. I guess this is one of those cases where I should have probably asked ai instead of google because I'm sure I would have been informed of this that way.
My issue is that there's no centralized power that has control over all the instances/states, which is how federation works. Edit: So I think calling it a federation is wrong. A confederation, sure, but it's not a federation unless there's something I'm missing.