I get it that things can have unfortunate names, but I’ve seen a lot of people proudly claim lemmy is “federated” or a “federation”. Isn’t a federation actually against what people want out of the fediverse?
Like, a federation in governments is about a bunch of otherwise self-governing states under a centralized government. Like the US, that’s a federation.
isn’t the whole point of the fediverse that it’s anti-centralization? Then why do people call it a federation positively? That sounds like the last thing I’d want it to be.
I think a confederation would work, but that’s not what I see people going for. Is that what it’s actually intended to be and people just call it the wrong thing?
Imo Reddit is more of a federation than the fediverse, since the subreddits are self-governing communities until the admins demand them to change something.
You’re assuming that the word federation means central governance over the component parts. It doesn’t. That’s just an element that happens to be present in well-known political federations, which are not the only kind.
I mean, without a central governance, just cooperation, isn’t it just a confederation then?
I think the problem here is you see “federation” as a political term and perhaps you don’t realise that “federation” as an information technology term has a different meaning.
A federation is a group of computing or network providers agreeing upon standards of operation in a collective fashion.
The term may be used when describing the inter-operation of two distinct, formally disconnected, telecommunications networks that may have different internal structures.[1] The term “federated cloud” refers to facilitating the interconnection of two or more geographically separate computing clouds
Oh, that would be it then, yeah. In hindsight, I should have asked chatgpt about this first, that would have probably told me about this. I did check google, but it only gave me information on federation in politics, so I assumed that’s the only thing there is.
This makes perfect sense then, thanks for clearing that up!
No worries! :-)
I think what we have here is more than just confederation, because the parts aren’t merely allied, but also operate as a unit.
This question might fuel some discussion over on !english@lemmy.ca .
The “central authority” is not an instance, but the ActivityPub protocol itself. Each instance is federated under ActivityPub, but is otherwise independent with their own platform and rules of interaction.
I see, I do think a confederation fits much more with that reasoning, but I can understand it from that perspective.
Federation: a group of organizations, countries, regions, etc. that have joined together to form a larger organization or government https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/federation
Just because some federations have central governing bodies doesn’t mean it’s a requirement.
You’re applying the political science definition of ‘federation’ and not the computer science definition. They are different. Federation in CompSci terms has to do with networking providers using standardization to interoperate, which is exactly what the fediverse does.
Yeah, someone else already pointed this out to me. All I was aware of (and got from google when checking) was the political definition, so I thought that’s all there is to it. I guess this is one of those cases where I should have probably asked ai instead of google because I’m sure I would have been informed of this that way.
Every instance is a state with its own rules.
My issue is that there’s no centralized power that has control over all the instances/states, which is how federation works. Edit: So I think calling it a federation is wrong. A confederation, sure, but it’s not a federation unless there’s something I’m missing.
The central power would be ActivityPub I guess.
