I think you’re confusing decentralized and distributed: geeksforgeeks.org/comparison-centralized-decentra…
Comment on My list of services I still miss in the fediverse
HamSwagwich@showeq.com 8 months ago
I think a lot of you are confusing Federation with decentralization. They are not the same thing.
the_ocs@lemmy.world 8 months ago
PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Exactly: I’d say federation and distribution are both a form of decentralization. Whereas distributed networks rely on P2P communication federated systems still have some centralized components but overall share no single point if failure.
HamSwagwich@showeq.com 8 months ago
Federated systems all have a single point it failure, the server. If a server instance disappears a significant portion of your data does as well, especially if it wasn’t federated. User accounts are a good example of this in Lemmy.
Just because a system is federated does not mean it’s decentralized, whereas a decentralized system has no risk of loss of data if a single system goes down. Federation is not that.
Spzi@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Big instances could be decentralized services as you describe. So one of their servers could go down without any functionality being lost.
So while federation does not imply decentralization, it also does not exclude it. In theory. In practice it excludes it a bit, since the fractured nature means more instances remain under the threshold above which it makes sense to have a decentralized instance over a monolith.
PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s simply not true. On the network system any federated system is decentralized. With a centralized network you literally have one server and if it dies all data is lost. With a federated system like the fediverse any server can go down but the data is still there if it has been cached by some other server.
PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Federation is decentralization. Instead of one server you have multiple user run ones.