Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.
Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.
Matrix is overall a spec, not just the main homeserver implementation, synapse. So things like P2P matrix, and lighter homeservers that could work locally are in development. Then you could control your blocklists, as opposed to relying on a server to do that for you.
IMO the reason matrix specifically is so reliant on a few servers is because:
These aren’t problems with federation, but the implementation of it. Federation overall is the only thing that has the potential to break the silicon valley fiefdom ( which only doesn’t feel as isolated, because there are so many users there ).
Yes matrix’s new slim dendrite server is being worked on with the intention for it to be used in p2p. I get there is many possible implementations of federation and I am totally down to take on ‘big tech’ it’s just to do that I think you not only need to match them but bring something better and I am not entirely seeing that yet. In fact I am even seeing subpar things like discoverablity, fragmentation, performance, complications like to all the rules and instances.
All of these problems would definitely would be worse in a p2p network. In a federated network they are easier to fix.
Which follows the rule that centralization is easier than decentralization, because p2p is more decentralized.