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
Yeah. And I find myself vacillating between agreeing with and disagreeing with the idea of defederation or partial defederation.
I think it requires enlightened admins to walk the line, which is a challenge. Not knocking the folks that run their respective instances, but they are humans who have their own motivations.
I feel that I would disagree with it more if it were possible/easy for individual users to block instances they don’t want to see
There’s a lot less angst to be had if people could migrate accounts here. Once you have that freedom, it just becomes about respecting freedom of association for admins as well as for users.
If an admin doesn’t want to host content coming from another site, that’s really their choice. If you want access to it, you have the choice to move to another site.
And that choice becomes a lot more palatable if you can move easily with minimal losses.
Exactly.
So you find an instance you love, with a federation philosophy you agree with, and build up a brand (for lack of a better word) there.
What happens when that philosophy either changes or allows the instance to become something different than what originally appealed to you? Do you suck it up and stay or try to create a new presence elsewhere with minimal damage?