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0 pointskick6y ago0 comments

Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).

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Angostura6y ago

It’s not clear to me what ‘decentralized’ means her, if not federated.

Perhaps you could explain?

EGreg6y ago

Federated means you’re part of a giant tree with some authority on the top (like DNS has with ICANN).

Decentralized means there is no center

I would add that Distributed to me seems there are no inherent “domains” you need to belong to, like for example email is federated but with scuttlebutt you’re identified by your public key and a hub is just a dumb relay and you can have many.

Non-federated routing alternatives include Kademlia (used in BitTorrent) and simple flooding/gossipping (like in Kazaa) or ad-hoc networks

danShumway6y ago

What's the authority at the top of Mastadon? You can have private instances that don't federate with anyone, and there's no coordinated authority that controls any other instance.

For that matter, what is the authority at the top of email? You and I can set up an email server and start talking to each other right now without anyone's permission. We don't have to be connected to anyone else, and we don't have any authority that can control our implementations or even that keeps track of what servers exist.

I don't get the comparison between Email or Mastadon to ICANN.

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Gaelan6y ago

I've generally seen decentralized as a synonym for federated, not distributed.

mcbits6y ago

The Web and email are both federated and thus theoretically decentralized, but in practice they're highly centralized. Yet another federated protocol (sitting on top of an already centralized federated protocol) is probably not a reliable path to decentralization.

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