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The Federation Fallacy
(rosenzweig.io)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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It's certainly a great read and is worthwhile, however I fundamentally disagree with the base premise that the goal of a federated system is to be uniformly distributed.
Why should an instance focused on a niche topic have the same representation as a general instance? Why should either have the same representation as one with abhorrent content?
Choosing your instance is effectively a statement that you agree with the mission of the particular instance. The number of low user instances demonstrates that there are a great number of people that share the author's vision of federation.
Because small instances tend to die out in the long run. You can see this with OpenID. OpenID promised us, the users, a way to have one set of credentials to login everywhere. But years later you go to a new site and all you can set are just three options: Facebook, Google and Apple.
Choosing your instance which is not a top dog means that some day you'll have to migrate. So if you're smart enough you just sign up for the biggest instance from the start. And that will only speed up the decline of small instances.