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How is federated social media better? (pawb.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Pro:

  • Interplatform Interaction(Activity Pub): Instances if the same platform and the Instances themselves can communicate (message, post, upvote, etc) with each other if they are federated.
  • Decentralized: Community managed instances means no commertial interest, no single point of failure and the option of having your own rules. Intances with bad rules or intentions do not get federated (can't interact with each other).
  • Free Open Source Software: Transparency and community contributions, If a project is abandoned it can always come back in the form a fork..
  • Privacy: No data collection, no data selling from the platform/intances themselves.
  • No advertisements
  • No shitty UI

Con:

  • Decentralized: People do not expect to have to choose a instance(server), and assume they are missing out on the other servers joining a particular one. And since its community supported the uptime and longevity of instances may be cut short.
  • Free Open Source Software: Community volunteers to delevop the platforms on their free time means that sometimes development can be slow or even the project is abandoned.
  • Cost on missing out on already established Big Tech platforms
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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I agree with your comment except that I think you've got the privacy part wrong there. Any company can come in and scrape all the information they want, including upvote and downvote info.

    In addition, if you try to delete a comment, it's very likely that it won't be deleted by every instance who federates with yours.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Yes, correct. I've should have mentioned that no tracking from the platform/instances themselves. Thank you by the way.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    What stops your instance from fingerprinting its users and selling that data? Even without explicit calls to google analytics or similar tools, you can do a lot with http requests and regular browser headers. I’m not saying that lemmy.zip does this, but lemmy isn’t free of tracking by design, is it?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    IMO it's ban/block evasion which is the biggest con to decentralization. It's a problem on centralized platforms but the many servers design makes it easier on fediverse.

    It's not a huge deal to me because I don't block many things but might be a consideration for people with a sensitive disposition.

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