What’s the point of federation, when we will end up having large clumps of users in specific communites under instances, where the owners of the instance can censor information, and enforce their political ideological false authory over everyone. If somebody doesn’t agree they can be banned without any valid reason. Federation is censorship resistant only to large government entities. We fail to realise that the issue with censorship is the owners and admins.
And yes, we can meke new instances that support our beliefs and that doesnt censor our speech, but then again we dont have an evenly distributed userbase. Having duplicate communities is cojnter intuitive anyways because it will confuse users. Lemmy is a failed project in my eyes unless they find a way to resolve these issues somehow.
Bad example but if i start a torrent, then the people who seed will own just as much of the torrent as i do. I’ll be equal with the peers without any upper hand. It cant be taken down or censored. Thats the idea i had.
The main federated service that pretty-much all Internet users use is email. It’s also been around for a long time, and it’s much more popular than other old federated services like IRC. So email is a well-understood example of how federation works in practice.
If you use Gmail and you decide that Google is evil, you can switch to Hotmail or any number of other providers, or even run your own mail server, and you can still send email to people who use Gmail.
That helps keep instance owners honest. You’ve never heard of Gmail and AOL and Hotmail and MIT all getting into a bun-fight over who’s evil and cutting off federation with each other, because that doesn’t happen. Doing so would piss off their own users, because people on Gmail expect to be able to get email from their mom on AOL and their buddy on Hotmail and the recruiter at the job they’re applying to, without interference from Google.