It’s a lot like my feelings on cryptocurrency. The dencentralized idea was interesting but it led to mostly discovering several reasons why it wasn’t as good as they thought. Some of the problems were solvable with future iterations, but overall it led to private exchanges that could just take all your money if they wanted, high transaction costs, etc.

With social media, federation addresses one thing: If an instance goes away, the content has already been federated elsewhere. For starters, this has never been a concern for me. I don’t treat any social media network as a long term data archive. If there’s something I need to refer back to, I will save the conversation myself or I am prepared for it to be deleted when I look away. Even on Lemmy, I don’t assume anything I post will stay, because moderator actions are federated, which will delete content from other instances anyway (when that federation is working correctly, at least)

On the other hand, we’ve already seen some of the negative sides of this:

First, users spam offensive/illegal content, which gets federated to all the other instances, leading to admins scrambling to a) stem the flow of this content and b) remove what is there. Ultimately they had to solve this with temporary defederation and user-created tools to help purge some of the content.

Second, federation is a (relatively) complex process, and there are multiple situations that can cause federation to an instance to fail. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen cases where if one instance’s keys are lost and certificates need to be regenerated, any instance that has seen that instance will be unable to federate with it anymore.

Now like I said before, these aren’t unsolvable problems, it’s just a case of the software and concept being relatively new, and needs to mature more.

Now when I switched to Lemmy, the complaints I saw about Reddit had absolutely nothing to do with federation and data availability. All I ever saw people complaining about was:

• Algorithms pushing content to benefit advertisers rather than the best end user experience
• Forcing UIs designed to satisfy advertisers rather than UIs end users want
• Admins/moderators making moderation decisions that users disagree with

These are significant issues, and are worth leaving a service over. However, federation doesn’t address them at all. Lemmy certainly does, but that has nothing to do with federation, that’s just it being open source and community-developed software.

So that’s what I meant. The one thing federation addresses is questionable, and the added complexity has brought about new problems that need to be solved still. I’m not against it, but it was never what drew me to this platform. It’s just a “Huh, that’s neat” kind of feature.