this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy

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Alright so I'm not an expert so I might not be explaining it correctly.

Federated Network: Multiple instances sharing content, such as Lemmy

Peer to Peer Network: There is no "instances", just peers. Many peers sharing content. Every user is a peer. There is no server costs, because every device connected to the network is acting like a mini-server. It will cost your device some storage space and network bandwith depending on the how the software is designed.

Or do you think Centralized servers are still gonna dominate the future?

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[โ€“] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

I think this article by Alyssa Rosenzweig is important to consider. I think it does make some assumptions about the purpose of federating, but it does make one very important point that I think everyone in this space is ignoring: the internet was already fundamentally federated from the beginning, and look how that turned out.

It's for this reason that I believe a fediverse only survives due to a culture of keeping it alive, but I don't know that that culture will survive long term in a free market. It might be that the internet is just like the rest of the world: an ebb and flow of democratic and totalitarian states, history being forgotten, lessons being relearned the hard way. That might just be how the internet works now.