- Traditional social applications like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram operate on a client-server model. As the user, all your interactions go through a single company’s servers. In a federated network, users are still interacting with a server, but anyone can run a server that interoperates with others in the network, giving users more providers to choose from.
- This gives users more choices for applications, policies, and community cultures. Email is an example of a federated protocol that everyone on the internet uses. Gmail is a popular email application, but if you use a different provider you can still communicate with anyone with an email address.
- Federated networks provide a familiar user experience, since users do not have to bear full responsibility for their account credentials, and can interact with content the way they’re used to.
- On the downside, a federated protocol might be slow to adapt while a centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond. WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update (email is still not end-to-end encrypted). Federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider (or instance) that the bulk of people use, federation becomes a sort of implicit threat. An open source infrastructure for a centralized network now provides almost the same level of control as federated protocols, without giving up the ability to adapt. If a centralized provider with an open source infrastructure ever makes horrible changes, those that disagree have the software they need to run their own alternative instead. It may not be as beautiful as federation, but at this point it seems that it will have to do.
- It has also many potentials. Because there are hundreds or even thousands of instances, the users get the privilege of choosing an instance whose rules they like, and which federates with other instances they wish to talk to. This system also makes it hard for marketing and spam to get a foothold — it optimizes for a self-governing system of human beings talking to human beings, and not for corporations to push their products.
- The [[governance]] of a federated system then becomes distributed among many operators. Every instance has the following privileges:
- To set the rules which govern users of their instance.
- To set the rules which govern who they federate with.
- It encourages fractal [[governance]] (e.g: communist at family level, liberal at state level, …)
- Users can choose servers based on trust, privacy policies, and community standards, which can enhance security and user control over data.
- The network needs a way to preserve content when a node goes down (probably using content-addressed storage).