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?
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.
The biggest thing is control and censorship.
On the corporate side if your posts and content are seen as too extreme in one way or another, depending on what government or group … you can be censored and have you posted either deleted, dismissed or hidden. In extreme cases, your account can also be shut down.
Xitter is already a propaganda hell hole that only pushes right wing content because they pushed out any criticism.
FB actively pushes its own content based on the highest bidder which often just means pushing right wing and conservative content in a regular basis.
Bluesky as open as it’s supposed to be has already had problems in Turkey where the government there asked bluesky to restrict access to many accounts.
The Fediverse will have these same problems and people and governments will try to censor people but due to the open non centralized nature of the system, it will be much harder for any one group or government to censor anyone. The only way they could shut it down would be to completely outlaw any platform that uses the protocol everywhere.
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
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.
Yes, correct. I’ve should have mentioned that no tracking from the platform/instances themselves. Thank you by the way.
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?
You data isn’t hoarded up and sold by the likes of meta etc.
Is that true though, with threads using activity pub?
Yeah it’s absolutely not true, everything done on the fediverse/activitypub is extremely easy to scrape (an unavoidable consequence of the design) and inevitably will be, if it isn’t happening already. Though, it’s true that it’s not being hoarded and since everyone can scrape it, it’s probably not being sold either!
Of course it is public. But I can be pseudo anonymous. I can have multiple aliases on different instances and I don’t have to register my phone number or other personal information. There’s no trackers tracking every damn thing I look at and correlating it all together. I can use it over Tor or VPN if I need more anonymization…
Sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. It’s just that none of what you’ve listed is inherent to the fediverse? There’s nothing preventing data collection of that sort by an instance owner, and claiming anonymity on a system explicitly designed around open ledger social media doesn’t seem entirely credible. There’s nothing preventing someone from including tracking pixels, for example, and your browser can still be fingerprinted and linked to your activity on lemmy by 3rd parties through a number of meta-analytical approaches.
I love the fediverse and there’s lots of good reasons for that, but I really just don’t think anonymity is a selling point here. Again, might be misunderstanding what you mean, if so I apologize!
