castles made of sand and fallacies made of straw

Posted Mar 5, 2019 23:56 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377)
In reply to: Replacing one fallacy with another by pjhacnau
Parent article: Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Separate to email I want to mention Mastadon again. In the context of the original article I feel like I'm really missing something. The author (and a couple of comments) seem to be trying to tear down something that, to me, isn't that big in the first place. As I said earlier, for me the biggest point of Mastadon (or Diaspora before it, or . . . ) isn't how "federated" it is (or isn't) but that it has really had no impact on the existing social media players. It's interesting, but doesn't really warrant huge praise or criticism. What gives?

To me, the biggest point of FOSS decentralized/federated communication platforms ('social media players') isn't about federatedness, or even impact on existing high-usercount platforms. To me the biggest point is Free Speech. From that perspective, the derived value of 'federatedness' comes into play. As each large-outlier member of the federation becomes a too-attractive chokepoint target for those who would wish to censor or 'shape the human terrain' of the free speech within that realm. While I still haven't read the whole article, I will point to the second paragraph-

Thus, permeating the community are calls for decentralisation. To attack the information silos, corporate conglomerates, and governmental surveillance, decentralisation calls for individuals to host servers for their own computing, rather than defaulting on the servers of those rich in data.

First I think there is a fallacy with the phrasing of 'decentralisation' as an entity. It's perhaps more important to understand that the 'permeating calls for decentralization' are on a political spectrum as diverse as the spectrum of (in the US) democrats and republicans and libertarians and christians and muslims and jews. I.e. I think the false assumption is that the important aspect of those 'permeating calls' is maximization of decentralization, versus maximization of free speech capability and/or privacy concerns.

In general the article seems a bit agenda/narrative pushing to me. 'unbridled aura' in the first sentence triggers my suspicion that someone has a 'bridling' narrative/agenda they are pushing.

Immediately in the third graf we get

In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator.

This seems to be a strawman narrative attacking people with positions such as mine. Strawman because it mischaracterizes the 'call for decentralization' into an extreme 'every toddler and grandmonther is required to...'.

That reads to me like someone who is trying to smear positions such as mine that advocate (see other comments) every *adult* *have the option*(not the requirement) to become their own system administrator. And that such *options*(NOT REQUIREMENTS) are a critically necessary aspect of achieving real hard-line Free Speech on the global information superhighway.

My apologies to the author if the toddler/grandmother issue is something they are responding to, versus creating. But from the tone of the first few paragraphs I get the impression Rosenzweig is either pushing, or completely falling for the toddler/grandmother/sysadmin anti-home-server narrative.