[afavour]

IMO these are tech solutions to social problems. As engineers it’s perhaps only natural that we gravitate towards them but I think there’s real danger of counter-productivity.

Lemmy and Mastodon are good examples of this. Federation is a PITA. I know people who tried to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and never succeeded, getting lost in the concept of different instances etc etc. Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run because the day to day operation of federation is way more complex than a centralised solution would be.

There’s nothing wrong with centralised services and Wikipedia is a great example of one that works. You just need the right governance structure and an audience willing to chip in to cover costs. Federation is over complicated and often unnecessary.

[marcosdumay]

> Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run

Compared to a theoretic distributed alternative, yes. But the largest instance of Mastodon, with something around 1% of the users of Twitter costs around $700 a month.