The Federation Fallacy
The Federation Fallacy
An interesting article I saw (from 2019) describing the potential intrinsic tendency for decentralized platforms to collapse into de facto centralized ones.
Author identifies two extremes, "information dictatorship" and "information anarchy", and the flaws of each, as well as a third option "information democracy" to try and capture the best aspects of decentralization while eschewing the worst.
Someone said the link is broken so here it is: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html
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I appreciate the call for democracy, but I think this totally misses the point of federation with it's complaint that not everybody is going to host their own server. The benefit of federation is not that every individual or small group will run their own server, it's that there will be multiple server options to choose from so if the one you're using goes bad you can just switch to another one. Even just getting to an email like system with a few major players and many smaller ones would be a big improvement over a single centralized server, but what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can't for email.
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They're not advocating for federation at all, but their criticism of the fediverse is based on it supposedly falling short of the "dream" that everyone or at least every technically able person will host their own server:
In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom.
Federation is a compromise. Rather than everyone hosting their own systems, ideally every technically able person would host a system for themselves and for their friends, and everyone’s systems could connect. If I’m technically able, I can host an “instance” not only for myself but also my loved ones around me. In theory, through federation my friends and family could take back their computing from the conglomerates, by trusting me and ceding power to me to cover the burden of their system administration.
None of the federated systems mentioned are dominated by one big player, and I don't see why we should expect that to be the trend.
The article contains a graph showing that (at least at the time it was written) Mastodon was strongly dominated by a single big player, with the top 3 instances holding 50% of users.
Clearly it cannot be dominated by a single big player if you have to add up the top three instances to get to 50% of the users
Maybe I'm not quite following you. Out of 3070 instances, 50% were registered in just the top 3. Whether it's the top 3 or top 1, doesn't this clearly show a tendency to cluster into large centralized monoliths? This type of power-law clustering is ubiquitous in all kinds of human behavior, but this would correspond to a really high exponent value for the distribution.
3 is a different number from 1. If a single instance had over 50% of signups it would be reasonable to describe it as dominated by a single big player. If the biggest instance only has 20% or whatever the reality is, then it is not dominated by a single big player.
Definitely there's a tendency to centralize up from thousands of little shards to a few big professional units - though as we see in every one of these examples, that doesn't mean the little ones have to disappear. You still have plenty of small email clients and small instances. What's important is that if one big one goes down or goes evil the other big ones are there, and that there's always the possibility of new small ones blowing up if they do something better than the big boys.
Then it seems like we're in agreement. The thrust of the article is not that the fediverse is bad, or that it doesn't improve upon the FAANG cartel model, but rather that decentralization by itself is not a silver bullet. It also needs to include the "bottom-up consensus seeking" that e.g. Wikipedia uses for its decision making.
Yes I get what the article was arguing. My critique is that it doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of the fediverse model, since it thinks there's something problematic about the sizes of instances follows a power distribution and refers to "the federated ideal, where all instances are created equal" in the sense of having the same number of users.
They clearly don't think that, since right after they said:
Of course, due to substantial inequality between instance size, we expect to see a power distribution, with a spike on the left that quickly falls and tapers out. Power laws govern much of the real world; many phenomena behave according to this unequal distribution.
But look at that graph. Calling this distribution a power law would be generous to say the least. There is a massive spike corresponding to just a few instances, and the rest of the graph is nearly invisible to the naked eye, so tiny and so overshadowed by just a few giants. Frankly, this distribution is closer to the Dirac delta function than a power law.
All of your comments in this thread seem to have been a strong defence against perceived criticisms of the Fediverse, when the article isn't so much criticizing it as it's proposing that it needs additional safeguards (besides decentralization) to ensure it remains aligned with users' interests:
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Firstly by alleging that the author advocates everybody running their own instance
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And now alleging that the author only considers Fediverse successful if all instances are the same size.
These are really disingenuous and uncharitable ways to read the article. I'm sure the author has a perfectly good understanding of the concept of Federation, as they detailed several examples, and they have a lot of experience in highly technical computer science work.
I'm fine with criticisms of the fediverse, my issue with this article is how the author repeatedly makes these negative comparisons of the existing fediverse to some 'dream' of what it is supposed to be like that seemingly exists only in the author's own head. You can see in each of my quotes where the author makes claims about how the fediverse should be much more decentralized than it actually is to live up to that dream, even if he doesn't necessarily claim to agree with that dream himself. As to the "does three equal one" question - clearly having three big instances sharing half the space and a long tail of thousands the other half is a very different scenario from having a single dominant instance.
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3067 is a lot of ways to slice half a pie. I'd consider even 16.5% (or whatever the top dog of that 3 with 50% has) to be domination.
Hmm domination in what sense? Maybe in terms of winning the competition for biggest instance, but clearly that's not big enough to impose their will on the whole.
It really depends. If you're in a smaller instance and you look at the global view, you're going to see more of Mr. 16.5% than one of the smaller ones.
Though I suspect usage patterns and the way users interact with instances beyond theirs will play a role. But, in an immediate sense, I could see larger instances having a bigger voice (so to speak).
And now I'll waffle and say it's all a crapshoot because people are unpredictable and social media platforms even more so.
I agree large instances have a bigger voice proportional to their larger size, but I don't think that's really an issue as long as there are plenty of instance options and no single one is so powerful it can force the system to conform to it rather than conforming itself to the system.
if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom
I also seem to recall that you need to know how to drive a car in order to operate one safely? Where does this entitlement come from that you shouldn't need to know anything in order to benefit from the hard work of others?
Anyway, how hard is it to heat up pizza in an oven, to assemble a cake/cookies/etc. from a pre-made mix, or to follow any set of simple instructions really? The bare minimum requirements to get an instance off the ground probably are not all that high, and if there was a demand for such then people could even make installer packages (I would guess that the complexities come from configuration options and such, like which OS are you running, and from maintenance operations, etc., but those too could be streamlined, much easier than making cars self-driving).
Anything is possible, if there is interest in making it happen.
I actually do think it's messed up that we make the ability to drive a car a prerequisite for living in most of the US - especially since our solution ends up being to make the driving test easy enough for everyone, even unsafe drivers, to pass, and then don't do anything to make sure people continue to be able to drive safely.
There are no "thoughts" behind that, and anything other than that would be "communism" (actually the word used would be socialism, but that exactly and precisely equals communism by those who would say that, leaving no room at all for interpretation, nuance, or subtlety, most especially how the most revered USA institutions are socialist i.e. sharing like schools, the post office prior to it being crippled 40 some odd years ago, police, firefighters, etc.).
I find it ironic that the situation with Reddit is starting to parallel the decline of US democracy - it's crumbling, but nobody cares. Sorry, I didn't mean to get all political - but it's hard not to when you talk about things like this, b/c that's what governs our laws, at any scale.
On the one hand, this is indeed what is happening now, the largest instances for lemmy and kbin are taking the vast majority of the new users. I think though that this is because people are signing up before they know what they are signing up for.
I think the point stands that while these large servers can handle the load while still federating fully, it's not a real problem. The problem with classic centralised systems can be seen with reddit right now. People are leaving because they are enforcing changes on people and there is no alternative. Whereas here, if these larger instances decided to place some draconian measures, people could simply say "no thanks" and sign up elsewhere. That is not compromised by having huge instances. I don't think these things can end the fediverse though.
what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can’t for email.
Not sure how that works. With emails, if I move from email123@aol.com to email123@protonmail.com I lose my old emails and people trying to contact me there, but I can just start over. If I remember peoples’ emails I can also tell them I moved to protonmail and to talk to me there. With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities; but I can just start over. If I remember people’s usernames and subscribed communities I can tell the people I moved and to talk to me there, and re-subscribe on the new account. Unlike with email I can still see my old account’s comments and posts, but otherwise I’m not sure how moving accounts in the Fediverse is different from changing emails.
You can actually move your email between services. But that rarely applies to private accounts. Moving business accounts between providers is not a big deal, just takes time to import/export data, which is kinda slow over IMAP.
Thank you for the clarification!
With federation, if I move servers I lose my comment, post, and upvoted history; people messaging me; and my subscribed communities
That is in no way an inherent limitation. It's just a current limitation with Lemmy and kbin.
You can move from one Mastodon instance to another and take your followers and follows with you. And if you move to a Calckey-bases instance, you can even import your old posts.
Thank you for the clarification! I don’t use Mastodon because I’ve never really been interested in Twitter, so I was very unaware of that.