Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

The title should perhaps have been "The decentralization fallacy". Federation is less about decentralization per se than about resilience. Today's centralized service providers are very good at providing resilient services, but they are ultimately profit-driven enterprises, and few of those survive for more than a few years. Public, federated protocols can and do stand the test of time as one dominant provider falls and another takes its place, without everyone having to write software from scratch every time.

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.