I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn’t come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they’re either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I’m on Bluesky too, but once that goes I’ll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
Federated social media is decentralized, so one single jackass can’t control it completely.
Like, maybe Elon Musk buys pawb.social, he now controls pawb.social & can be a tyrant in pawb.social just like he has been with Twitter.
He still can’t control quokk.au, or lemmy.world, or feddit.org, or lemmy.ca, or lemmy.dbzer0.com, or lemmy.blahaj.zone, etc.
And in the extremely unlikely event that if Elon does manage to buy pawb.social, it is extremely likely that many lemmy servers would just defederate from pawb.social & leave pawb.social isolated from the rest of the fediverse.
It’s the best.
Social media owned by some billionaire asshole is for idiots.
No billionaire owns any angle of human behavior.
Except maybe blood lust.
They own my blood lust.
I’m thirsty.
There is no single point of failure.
If one instance goes down they don’t take the whole thing with it. If one instance gets taken over by corporate interests, it does not take all the other instances with it.
If a community on sweatyballs.social is dogshit, someone can create the same named community on poopfed.io as a replacement. The site administrator of sweatyballs.social can’t do anything about that.
This can also be a negative to some degree, but being able to block and defederate allow for mitigating those risks.
Preventing one single entity from having too much control over information to the extent that they can push propaganda and dominate a narrative.
Decentralization leads to better (I didn’t say perfect) democratization of social media.
Lemm.ee is shutting down. The Fediverse still exists.
If Reddit shuts down, welp.
If Reddit shuts down, welp.
nelsonlaugh.gif
control is dispersed and you can flee bs to a better instance. This makes it almost impossible to censor in a targeted way.
In your example, if bluesky goes you lose it all (until/if their form of federation actually exists and is usable). If the Mastodon server I’m on (toot.community, because I like the name) goes, you move to another or host your own and keep on trucking.
When reddit did their API shit i left and lost the account, subreddits, apps, everything. When Lemm.ee announced it’s shutdown i moved to lemmy.zip and picked up exactly where I left off.
Resilience. Federated social media is resilient against censoring and corporate takeover.
It.does however not help with eee attacks which I why most of us block threads and a lot will block other fediverse sized (or larger) single instances of eg bluesky etc.
Other, less important (to me) benefits are no algorithms, no profit motive, no ads.
The fediverse is just better in any way.
