Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

> In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom.

Not only an accessibility nightmare, but also a monetary nightmare. Not everybody can afford their own server, domain, et cetera. Actual money can be also price for privacy, and that means that all but economical elite are walled off from freedom.

The compromise – hosting a system for oneself and for one’s friends – doesn’t help much. I’m actually in charge of a small Internet community (kinda relevantly, democratic – I was elected to the position), and we would really want to self-host our mailing list – but we can’t really do it, all we can afford is a shared server that makes setting it all up practically impossible. So we use an external centralised mailing list service for lack of the better options.

I don't think Wikipedia makes a good examples of a democracy though. Maybe viewed from afar, but when you have seem the way things play out in practice, it's clearly not so much a model of a democracy, as a corrupt bureaucracy, filled with abuse, unneeded strife, cronyism, and false flags.

Then again, maybe this is closer to modern democracy than I want to believe.

Still, I think the enforced hierarchy of their system breeds many of these problems. Maybe it's worth disclaiming the specifics a bit to make your argument a little stronger.

This sets the bar for success unreasonably high. It means a successful decentralized system must somehow enforce norms on its participants in spheres well beyond the scope of the system itself. It also suggests a good system will somehow prevent any one participant for attracting "too much" traffic. Both of those features would imply restrictions on freedom, which would probably make people uncomfortable when you have worked out the details.

In fact the Web is a great example of a decentralized system. Contra the author, it *is* easy for anyone technical to set up a Web server and in practice a lot of people and organizations do set up their own servers and attract large amounts of traffic. (There are also numerous services to support non-technical people publishing Web content.) The standards that govern the technology are not controlled by any one company (as long as Mozilla survives). You have lots of viable choices for technology and services to set up a Web site, most of which are open-source. You also have multiple viable independent open-source clients. Web standards support delivering almost any kind of application and content. Sweeping all this decentralized goodness aside because Facebook and Youtube exist seems short-sighted.

It seems like this discussion is similar to what people in the crypto-currency community are realizing about governance being an unavoidable reality.

a) I'd hardly call it "lengthy" - took me 5 minutes to read. (For reference I would consider "lengthy" to start at around 20 minutes for a first pass) - and that's a criticism of the expectations raised by the lead-in rather than the article.
b) It degenerates rapidly (IMO) into under-defined jargon - e.g. "information dictatorship" and "information anarchy".
c) (the point I'm going to expand on) It talks about federation as a "fallacy" then presents a false dichotomy.

Let's look at what I consider the key point in the article:

"
In reality, guess how many instances encompass half of the user base. Maybe 1,000? Alright, there are some big instances in there, so perhaps 100? Well, there are a lot of really tiny instances mixed in, so possibly only 20?

The answer?

Three.

Just three instances encompass 50.8% of users.
"

So there are only three main nodes. Well, that's still 300% of the externally visible nodes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, ....
Also, that covers 50.8% of users. That means that 49.2% of users are on nodes other than those three.

Likewise email. Yep Google Mail has a huge hunk of email users. But there are other large servers, and plenty of smaller servers.

The false dichotomy is the implicit message I got from the first half: "A large number of roughly equal weighted is federated, any other distribution is centralization". As far as I'm concerned Mastadon _is_ still federated. People choosing not to manage their own personal server, and instead use someone else's server (either for free or for money) does not affect whether something is federated or not. The protocol is open and any individual or organization could set up new nodes and create a significant redistribution of users. A point that's actually made further down the article:

"True, Mastodon is de facto centralised, but despite the size of the largest instances, it retains the ability to federate with other Mastodon instances. Further, Mastodon is able to federate with other free software friendly networks via a pair of common protocols, creating the familial fabric of the “fediverse”. Centralization and federation can certainly co-exist in harmony to improve efficiency while retaining user choice."

So which is it? Is federation "dead" or is it still there?

There's major issues for federated systems; last time I checked Mastadon had not displaced Twitter for the general public, and to me _that_ is a bigger problem than how many federated Mastadon nodes are popular. The Web is also a federated system. I would argue that the inherent federated nature is a reason things are not 100% centralized now. Matrix offers another interesting federated option; it will be interesting to see how the adoption by the "French Ministry of Digital" plays out.

I would summarize the last section generally as "the issue is less the technology; the culture we build on top of whatever platform is at least as important". A gross simplification I acknowledge, but I was struggling for a phrase longer than "information democracy" and short enough to fit here. A federated system doesn't necessarily ensure freedom, but it makes it much easier to construct freedom, centralization of servers or not. In that I _think_ we are in agreement.

So I actually agree with where the article finishes, I just think the whole "federation is dead", "federation is a fallacy" was over-played and a distraction from the good bits.

Further, the lack of federation keeps people trapped in silos. So an annoyed gmail user can switch to outlook.com and still communicate with the same bunch of people using their original email addresses. If the same user gets annoyed by whatsapp and wants to switch to hangouts, they have to persuade all their friends to switch with them because whatsapp and hangouts won't federate.

If a silo doesn't federate, the barrier to switching is orders of magnitude higher, which is why the major silos hate federation. I honestly think they'd actually remove email federation if they thought they should get away with it ... Google has been making moves to regard smaller email servers as more spammy, which seems to be an attempt to gauge the backlash involved in removing federation. After all, if you have to have a google account to talk to your hangout buddies, why shouldn't you need a gmail one to talk to your gmail ones.

Just to name a couple of issues.

1) Migration. If there is no possibility to straightforwardly migrate to another instance of the federated service, then it is obvious that all the non-professional servers are doomed from the beginning. Who would put his data on a server that may need to be discontinued without any assurance that he/she can migrate it elsewhere without too much effort. For instance, I think that this is the main reason why the mastodon users all concentrate on 3 servers.

2) Poor support for things that users expect to be global. If you have a social-network like service or a chat/voice/voice+video communication service you expect to be able to search the person you want to talk to "globally". This is one of the reasons why things like facebook or skype are so successful. Once someone tells you "I'm on facebook" or "I'm on skype", even if you are not told the username or you forget it, you are typically able to find him/her. In many federated systems, search only works at the level of the single server you are on, and this means that in terms of features and easiness of use, you would be better off if there were only one server.

> Do your friends?
Yes, why

> Does your grandmother?
I had two and both are dead, so no to that

> Setting up a mail server often is time-consuming, ad hoc, and brittle; despite technical literacy and the hours I poured in, I continue to have problems with my e-mail delivery.
Suddenly, the problem came into focus: Alyssa Rozenzweig is worthless at basic computing.

There is still a problem of DDoS though. But she's not even there.

I remember well that before Gmail came Yahoo! Mail, and before that Hotmail; I remember, too, that before Wikipedia and DuckDuckGo I went to Google for information, and before that Yahoo!, and before that Altavista, and before that Infoseek. Internet mail was not re-invented each time; the Web was not re-invented each time.

Federation works.

With that point taken, the next question that arises is: how to turn email into a more democratic online service?

I wonder if Alyssa or anyone else has ideas on how a viable business model for a more democratic email service could look like. I guess that it would have to somehow provide additional benefit through community interaction, like Wikipedia does. Privacy-respecting traditional email providers do exist, but are obviously not successful compared to the monopolist.