I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn’t come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they’re either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I’m on Bluesky too, but once that goes I’ll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
Preventing one single entity from having too much control over information to the extent that they can push propaganda and dominate a narrative.
Decentralization leads to better (I didn’t say perfect) democratization of social media.
Spez isn’t in full control. (Slimy little worm.)
Lemm.ee is shutting down. The Fediverse still exists.
If Reddit shuts down, welp.
If Reddit shuts down, welp.
nelsonlaugh.gif
Aside from the theoretical reasons, which are great, it feels like on the federated services there’s less speaking at people, and more actual conversations.
Federated social media is decentralized, so one single jackass can control it completely.
Like, maybe Elon Musk buys pawb.social, he now controls pawb.social & can be a tyrant in pawb.social just like he has been with Twitter.
He still can’t control quokk.au, or lemmy.world, or feddit.org, or lemmy.ca, or lemmy.dbzer0.com, or lemmy.blahaj.zone, etc.
And in the extremely unlikely event that if Elon does manage to buy pawb.social, it is extremely likely that many lemmy servers would just defederate from pawb.social & leave pawb.social isolated from the rest of the fediverse.
missing a word in your first sentence
Oops, my bad. Thanks. It’s been corrected.
There’s 1️⃣ unique draw to the fediverse : depending on service , you can (view|interact with) all different kinds of posts without (necessarily) needing to create separate accounts for different services (experience will vary depending on what software your instance runs though) . Examples :
- Can view (peertube|pixelfed|lemmy|.*) posts directly from your mastodon account
- [km]bin are threadiverse softwares that also allow you to (view|post) the twitterlike style posts you see on (mastodon|(.*)(oma|key)|.*) instances and not just reddit style threadiverse posts
… but that’s about where tangible benefits end IMO . Fediverse only better in (technical|data privacy|potentiality) sense , may be more resistant to enshittification (tangent : wish there was better word for this , “enshittification” sounds kinda stupid IMHO) but don’t believe it’s completely immune
Also I’ve seen enough fedimeta to know “run by huge dickwads” not (exclusive to centralised services|isolated issue) . Every other big fediverse (instance|project) feels like it’s managed by temporarily embarrassed (Elon musk|matt mullenweg)s , so like , pick your poison !
It isn’t. It just aligns better with the privacy preferences of some people.
Which is kinda funny, because from what I gather, it’s even less private than some of the large social networks. (everyone can see everything vs one entity sees everything, but no one else).
I think this video explains it better than I could do https://videos.elenarossini.com/w/64VuNCccZNrP4u9MfgbhkN
In your example, if bluesky goes you lose it all (until/if their form of federation actually exists and is usable). If the Mastodon server I’m on (toot.community, because I like the name) goes, you move to another or host your own and keep on trucking.
When reddit did their API shit i left and lost the account, subreddits, apps, everything. When Lemm.ee announced it’s shutdown i moved to lemmy.zip and picked up exactly where I left off.
It takes power away from the hands of corporations.
Sorry you got suckered into choosing bluesky over Mastodon. Hopefully you’ll learn one day.
It’s the best.
Social media owned by some billionaire asshole is for idiots.
No billionaire owns any angle of human behavior.
Except maybe blood lust.
They own my blood lust.
I’m thirsty.
must be the pretzels.
There is no single point of failure.
If one instance goes down they don’t take the whole thing with it. If one instance gets taken over by corporate interests, it does not take all the other instances with it.
If a community on sweatyballs.social is dogshit, someone can create the same named community on poopfed.io as a replacement. The site administrator of sweatyballs.social can’t do anything about that.
This can also be a negative to some degree, but being able to block and defederate allow for mitigating those risks.
control is dispersed and you can flee bs to a better instance. This makes it almost impossible to censor in a targeted way.
The only advantage I can see is that is goes back to a more fragmented internet.
The internet of hundreds of forums forming small communities, but this time you don’t need to make an account on every single forum.
All the problems I see people complaining about in my opinion they all have in common one thing, too many people in a single place. Either because it gets impossible to manage and moderate or it needs to make money because it is very expensive to run.
Resilience. Federated social media is resilient against censoring and corporate takeover.
It.does however not help with eee attacks which I why most of us block threads and a lot will block other fediverse sized (or larger) single instances of eg bluesky etc.
Other, less important (to me) benefits are no algorithms, no profit motive, no ads.
The fediverse is just better in any way.
