With a centralized network you literally have one server and if it dies all data is lost.
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.
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.