An interesting article I saw (from 2019) describing the potential intrinsic tendency for decentralized platforms to collapse into de facto centralized ones.

Author identifies two extremes, “information dictatorship” and “information anarchy”, and the flaws of each, as well as a third option “information democracy” to try and capture the best aspects of decentralization while eschewing the worst.

Someone said the link is broken so here it is: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

  • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Yes I get what the article was arguing. My critique is that it doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp of the fediverse model, since it thinks there’s something problematic about the sizes of instances follows a power distribution and refers to “the federated ideal, where all instances are created equal” in the sense of having the same number of users.

    • BarackObama@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      They clearly don’t think that, since right after they said:

      Of course, due to substantial inequality between instance size, we expect to see a power distribution, with a spike on the left that quickly falls and tapers out. Power laws govern much of the real world; many phenomena behave according to this unequal distribution.

      But look at that graph. Calling this distribution a power law would be generous to say the least. There is a massive spike corresponding to just a few instances, and the rest of the graph is nearly invisible to the naked eye, so tiny and so overshadowed by just a few giants. Frankly, this distribution is closer to the Dirac delta function than a power law.

      All of your comments in this thread seem to have been a strong defence against perceived criticisms of the Fediverse, when the article isn’t so much criticizing it as it’s proposing that it needs additional safeguards (besides decentralization) to ensure it remains aligned with users’ interests:

      These are really disingenuous and uncharitable ways to read the article. I’m sure the author has a perfectly good understanding of the concept of Federation, as they detailed several examples, and they have a lot of experience in highly technical computer science work.

      • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’m fine with criticisms of the fediverse, my issue with this article is how the author repeatedly makes these negative comparisons of the existing fediverse to some ‘dream’ of what it is supposed to be like that seemingly exists only in the author’s own head. You can see in each of my quotes where the author makes claims about how the fediverse should be much more decentralized than it actually is to live up to that dream, even if he doesn’t necessarily claim to agree with that dream himself. As to the “does three equal one” question - clearly having three big instances sharing half the space and a long tail of thousands the other half is a very different scenario from having a single dominant instance.