Fediverse

To be honest I think that this posts kinda misses the point of federation. Federation is not really about privacy (it wouldn't make sense anyway since most of the fediverse content is entirely public).

The fediverse brings freedom to social networking, allowing us not to be dependant on a single host. The state of the fediverse is already significantly better than centralised networks in this regard. Also, the none of the hosting platforms criticised here rely on the number one factor of erosion of privacy: advertisement. I have a really hard time believing that Amazon, and other hosting providers spy on the VMs they host (outside of police investigations). It would be quite expensive and inefficient for them to extract any useful information. Unlike Facebook/Twitter host providers already have a clear business model that doesn't involve advertisement, and they have a lot to lose if it turned out that they spied on their customer's VMs.

I don't see how this is a problem. This is to be expected and not ideal, but very hard to solve and already 100 times better than the alternative

Interesting fact about Matrix.org (a protocol mostly focused on decentralized instant messaging while ActivityPub is more for social networks):

"One thing I love about @matrix is how independent of a server a room can be. It requires at least one server for now, but it’s easier to see it as a “a room in the Matrix universe”. It has one main door, but can have many other doors, all leading to the same room. Each door lives on one server, but the room lives on several servers at once."

Source: https://mamot.fr/@thibaultamartin/105861724585009325

your hosting provider has access to all your and your user's data

This statement is a ridiculously absurd exaggeration. It's like complaining that your bank has access to your money.

Yes, the hosting provider has the ability to access your VM and extract data. They will give access to the police if they receive a warrant. This is not the same as putting your data on platforms like twitter and facebook, which mine your data, sell user profiles to advertisers and manipulate you.

technically not better than using Twitter if the provider decides to act maliciously with the data

This is a big "if". If a cloud provider is found to leak customer's data regularly they would lose credibility quickly. (Don't get me wrong, I still think owned hardware and a P2P model similar to Briar is better)

As a side note, If anything the underlying problem of ActivityPub is that it has no method to prevent centralization. Just like email, a few large companies can capture the majority of users.

This is absolutely true, but expected.

One of the reasons why I see federation only as a stepping stone. The real deal is not a federated system, but a distributed one, and I hope I will live to see one becoming mainstream. Ah, and I hope it is not scuttlebutt ... but that's another question, right? :D

Perhaps this could be mitigated by making the deployment process simpler, ie: a single static binary to download and run instead of having to set up a million different services and edit a million different configuration files. But then again, as long as there is any friction to the setup process, there will be centralization in the form of large servers, as users will go down the path of least resistance.

I guess the real solution here is to simply abandon the concept of federation all together and instead use a peer-to-peer (p2p) model. A p2p model would completely alleviate the problem of centralization by enforcing decentralization, by simply removing the possibility of centralization using design.

it's really easy to move a mastodon instance. I know because I did it. it should eventually be as easy to move a lemmy instance. each admin that has the ability to move their instance if they want to represents a meaningful point of decentralization. "The underlying problem" sounds so dramatic.