Decentralising the Internet
Jason Prado,
New Socialist,
Oct 11, 2018
This is a pretty good article overall but would have benefited a lot from some clear definitions at the start. So here we go: by centralized, we mean essentially that everybody uses the same server (ie., everybody uses the same URL, for example, facebook.com). By federated, we mean essentially that there is more than one server (for example, mastodon.social and scholars.coop, etc), people can choose which server to use, and they communicate with each other through the servers. A federation is still sort of centralized, because there can be many people per server, and a few large instances can dominate. By decentralized what we mean is one server per person, where the servers can talk to each other directly. And all of that said, any network will tend to centralize if it is scale free. Decentralization requires hard limits on size. And that's the part we keep getting wrong.
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