Comment on My list of services I still miss in the fediverse
PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 11 months agoExactly: 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 11 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 11 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 11 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.
Spzi@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I’ll try in a less hostile manner, if I may.
You’re right that Lemmy is decentralized if we view it from far away. Individual instances may disappear, the network itself still remains.
The other person’s perspective was more zoomed in. If we look at individual instances, they can very much disappear, and users of that instance will have lost functionality. That includes both people with accounts on that instance, and users of communities hosted there.
For big instances, we can imagine they are both. So even if one of their instance servers goes down, no functionality or data is lost, as they continuously internally mirror their data.
However, most instances are monoliths.
PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Exactly thats what I think too. I was talkkng about the network itself while he was talking about single instances. But thats the difference to a distributed system where you have ni central servers at all. Still on the network level both federated and distributed systems are decentralized.
HamSwagwich@showeq.com 11 months ago
You just described Lemmy.
The fact that you don’t understand that federation != decentralization is the problem. Just because something is federated does not mean it’s decentralized. Decentralized means all data is stored on all nodes and the loss of any one node does not compromise that data. That’s not Lemmy. If your Lemmy server goes down, significant portions of your data go with it, which proportions vary, but you WILL lose data. That’s not decentralized, but everyone agrees Lemmy is federated, yes? Therefore, federation is not decentralization.
PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Dude you can literally count the number of independent instances. How can you assume that the network isn’t decentralized? A network where the data is distributed over the user nodes is called a distributed system for a reason. Decentralization does not mean that one part of the network can’t go down but the network itself will survive it.