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   Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Nov-2022 02:02:29 JST Alexandre Oliva

   • Javier Alvarez
   when it comes to the fediverse, ISTM the biggest challenge to newcomers is to choose an instance, that supposedly ties them to a certain interest group. the tying is imaginary (misleading docs?), and mostly unrelated with federation (picture a centralized service that requires naming a primary interest). it's a bit like choosing a place to live, that is going to affect your life in some ways, and even which communities you could viably participate in, but that is not definitive nor quite as determinant or exclusive as often described: you could choose to move elsewhere later. but it does have a significant impact if you pick a place that turns out to be very hostile to you. and somehow, despite all the difficulties and risks involved, people still go and seek places to live and buy or rent houses or condos or rooms or whatever.
   • Embed this notice
     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Nov-2022 11:28:26 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • CyberSpook??
     yeah, that's a fundamental problem of services delivered through servers, that federation doesn't even attempt to address. as mentioned in the other thread, p2p/f2f networks do, and I'd love us to move to that architecture instead of retaining this undesirable aspect of surveillance capitalism, namely dependency on exclusive servers. there seem to be some misconceptions about how difficult that would be for users, but we're seeing that choosing a server is *the* main perceived obstacle to joining a federated network, so I'm more and more convinced that jumping straight to p2p might have eased the adoption path.
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     CyberSpook?? (cyberspook@soc.redeyes.site)'s status on Saturday, 19-Nov-2022 11:28:28 JST CyberSpook??

     in reply to

     • Javier Alvarez
     @lxo
     The only major problem is that a third-party server is always a single point of failure, no matter how nicely it may present itself. If some authority requests some sensitive data from the server owner you are essentially defenseless unless the server owner is that principled to resist gag orders. Affinity groups on the other hand do not require you to even know each other. In decentralized self-hosted networks affinity groups are a circle of friends you hang out with. You do not need to trust each other, you give them only the data you want to give them, nothing more. Unlike with federated servers.
     @jmangt