this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2021
27 points (100.0% liked)
Fediverse
20505 readers
24 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is Matrix centralised? It's federated, just like email. If anything, mumble and IRC are more centralised.
Like 75% percent of the network runs on the official matrix.org servers and small scale selfhosting is not all that feasible, given how resource hungry Synapse is (although that is getting slowly better).
That's not a technical but a social issue though. Matrix doesn't have dozens but hundreds of installations. I guess your 75% are exaggerated.
With that argument you should not like Lemmy. Way more than 75% of the network is from Lemmy.ca . It takes time for things to decentralise as long as the ability is there.
Matrix isn't a super young project like Lemmy though, and Lemmy has the explicit goal to be lightweight to self-host. Oh and Lemmy doesn't have a (basically) centralized identity server like Matrix.
I know that, but I never seen any instance of Matrix that's not matrix.org. Also email is becoming more and more centralized because almost everybody uses Gmail or something else from GAFAM. I mean, on paper it's decentralized, but the fact everybody uses Matrix make it more and more dependent on one server.
The centralization of IRC doesn't matter though, the fact there is no chat history makes it irrelevant to be centralized or not, if Freenode dies, something else can replace it without any problem.
Also a tiny note again about emails, due to the difficulty to setup an email server yourself (that doesn't end up in the spams of everybody), I don't really think emails are so decentralized in practice.
TL;DR, there is a difference between the things on paper and the things in reality.
I like to quote myself on this one.
There is a part of technical stuff though. If you have a very resource consuming technology, it's obvious that less people are going to install it, which is the case of Matrix.
Also, "social issues" can be managed, for instance, the main Framasoft closed the registrations of the main Mastodon instance because they thought the network was becoming too centralized on their instance.
Nobody in the real world cares about resources. I do, but that's not the reason for people not adopting Matrix. It's rather silly reasons like "it doesn't have sticker packs!" or "I don't understand where I need to create an account and why".
I mean, people with low-end servers aren't going to install a matrix server. So it's limiting the decentralization of Matrix.
You don't need to install a matrix server to use it.
That means you will be more dependent on Matrix.org server, unlike in Mastodon, where there are many different instances.