Comment by glenstein
12 days ago
I don't disagree, but I'm baffled that, with P2P as your preferred outcome, your orientation toward federated infrastructure is one of opposition rather than support. It feels philosophically confused to me; they're your natural allies, they're a step in your preferred direction and they have an instance of real world success (well, to a degree) which is important. Whatever theory of change motivates this form of criticism of federated services can't be one that's, say, intentional or strategic about outcomes. It feels more first principles.
One might also ask why P2P thesis statements only ever show up deep in the weeds in comment sections in response to the fediverse when logically speaking they would make just as much sense if not more in response to, say, any post about Facebook as a company or social media writ large, or business news about acquisitions, consolidation of web infrastructure into fewer hands, enshittification, or escalations of control over platforms.
Again, I'm fully on board with the dream of P2P but it feels like Buzz Aldrin criticizing Neil Armstrong for not doing enough to bring humanity into the space age.
I think supporters of P2P as "the one true way" perhaps don't realize that federation is just as peer to peer if your user count is 1.
The fundamental distinction between a communication network that is p2p and one that is federated is the storage mechanism.
For p2p the network itself is the storage, and as a participating node you connect and retrieve what is addressed to you while the amorphous data blob that contains said messages remains to float in the network. While for a federated network, the receiving node needs to be present on the network at all times to be able to access/receive the messages addressed to itself, after which the messages are absent from the network (to some degree or another).
Personally the overhead of having the network having to bear the weight of all its nodes data is too large to make it viable.
This is a flawed argument. If someone wants X they don't need to also support Y just because it's closer to X than other alternatives.
It's not a logical syllogism. And I would hope you have more to say about the coherence of a position than that it's merely not forbidden by logic, which is something less than an affirmative defense of its coherence and its motivations. It's about the perfect being the enemy of the good. "Well it's not forbidden by logic" is about as pathetically empty handed as it gets, in terms of accounting for which battles you're picking.