this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2021
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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6 reasons the decentralised Fediverse is better than regular centralised social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc (slashdev.space)
submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Social media sucks. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are designed to turn your precious free time into money. What we see as a nice way to stay in touch with our friends, in reality are just many hits of dopamine stimulating precise spots in your brain, leading to you spending more time on the platform consuming ads.

But what if I told you that there is a huge ad-free social network out there, not governed by a central authority, full of great people and completely free to use? This place is called the Fediverse. Well, it's not really a place, it's many places.

See the 6 reasons and a good short overview of what the Fediverse is about at https://slashdev.space/posts/2021-01-18-reasons-the-fediverse-is-better

#technology #opensource #fediverse #alternativeto #privacy

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

While I like the fediverse, I don't buy most of these reasons.

  1. "It's decentralized." This is no reason in itself. That description rather says "It's resilient." Well, the big social websites have a pretty good uptime as well, so not a good reason.

  2. "It can't be censored." The description uses a warped definition of censorship. Originally, it is only about censoring by the government. Banning Trump is actually the reverse and no censoring. The argument is correct that in the fediverse you can switch to another equal instance. Switching from Twitter to Instagram is not equal.

  3. "Free as in freedom". The description is actually more about public auditing than freedom. This is not a good argument because an admin in the fediverse can patch his instance without anybody noticing. The federation still lowers the impact though.

  4. "It respects your privacy". Same issue. An admin can patch their instance and no public audit defends against that. The federation still lowers the impact."

  5. "It's all about the community" Maybe. Maybe the crazy people have just not yet discovered the fediverse in significant numbers. An eternal september could occur. Federation might help. It might not.

  6. "There's an instance for everyone" Well, there is also a subreddit for everyone and a twitter hashtag and ...

Conclusion: 1, 2 and 6 are no reason to me. 3 and 4 are reasons but not strong ones. For 5 there is not enough data yet.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago
  1. Centralised sites have been known to have outages up to a few hours affecting all users. But I think it was more about centralised sites like Twitter being very easy to block by governments, and frequently done. Decentralisation allows for more flexible / or not rules, giving choices, and allowing interest based nodes to flourish. Decentralised (and usually federated eg. with ActivityPub) means one friend can be using Pixelfed as their Instagram type usage, while another friend can be on Mastodon for Twitter type micro-blogging, but they can still interact with each other without being forced to use the same social network.
  2. Yes I think it meant not only not easy to block, but also not easy to monitor via a central point.
  3. And anyone can, and do, start up their own instances. I created my own Hubzilla node with me as the sole user, so I could fully manage functionality and my own rules. True generically on Subreddits and hashtags but a proper instance or node does give that like-minded community more control, and more so if they are a fringe group of society.