Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.
Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.
lel you knew where I was going with it
Privacy actually is something the closeted conservatives are gung-ho about compared to other people, and the whole phenomenon of decentralised socialist internet being pursued by right wingers fascinates me a lot. This is not me dividing people into groups, but a general discourse I have observed over many years of using clearnet, the different IM protocols and the Tor and I2P darknets.
Matrix enjoys its popularity because of one reason, being centralised with matrix.org server, which is ironic since Matrix advertises itself as highly federated. It shows us in a way that the world is not ready for decentralisation, and it will always act as an obstacle compared to a default centralised communication medium. This is something I really want to push through as a debate among people, Moxie has been pushing hard on Signal staying centralised as well (not considering Moxie as merit worthy, but Signal being merit worthy compared to WhatsApp and the like).
Poor people, backfire theory working against them and they will not listen even if told to self critique. Self critique ability is what made me accept socialism so deeply, I feel.
matrix.org is becoming massive, and the costs keep piling. I personally think there should be a list of servers to choose from, where Matrix officially allows and manages distribution of users to make for easy federation, lowered load per server and lowered latency and load issues for client end.
Although this is not exactly done by XMPP either, which they should IMHO, what does exist are server lists by 404 city or snopyta. Servers in that case should also be made to fulfill strict compatibility and feature support equirements.
or Matrix could just solve p2p really well. The matrix.org situation has been mentioned by the p2p dev as motivation for p2p. The side benefit is matrix p2p solutions should work for other projects.