this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
88 points (97.8% liked)

Asklemmy

43400 readers
1038 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[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.