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Comment by dopu | Hacker News Reader

Are these things so important that we should give up the easier maintainability (and potentially, security) that comes from centralization and the standardization of user clients? I absolutely think projects like Matrix are worthwhile, but it seems foolish to me to argue that there are no benefits that come from doing things the way Signal does. Besides, as sexy as decentralization is, in the wild it is not really practiced. Mastodon is decentralized, but last I heard ~50% of users were on 3 nodes [0]. I'm assuming it's a similar situation for Matrix.

[0]: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

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> Mastodon is decentralized, but last I heard ~50% of users were on 3 nodes

I would argue that the user distribution does not matter. What's important is eliminating network effects, which you get with federation.

I think most people would consider email a successful federated service, and yet far more than half of users are only on the biggest three servers.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/whos-the-biggest-u-s-e-mail-se...

I agree: if say the 3 nodes used different implementations, this would basically be an ideal situation.

I don't know about Mastodon's case, but in Matrix the extremely low popularity of alternative servers is kind of a big roadblock.

> in Matrix the extremely low popularity of alternative servers is kind of a big roadblock.

This sounds like the opposite of the point I was making. What is this a roadblock to?

Because at some point if there is only one server implementation and one server, they can get away if they change the protocol.

In my opinion an ideal position is somewhere between the two extremes - promote the use of a single official client and server and let 99% of users use just that, but allow the development of alternatives for those that want them.

There are more possible stances than just "we disallow third party clients" and "we strongly encourage third party clients".

Which is what Telegram does.

Still, I would like to see proper use of encryption by Telegram. Secret chats have no meaning if no one uses them.

Federation is not an extreme, it’s the only choice sustainable in the long term. Where will Signal get money to support, say, 1 billion people? It’s just another walled garden. Telegram is already starting to show ads for this reason.

Note that the plan for Matrix is to implement support for full decentralisation by bundling a lightweight server with a client. A longer term plan is to also decouple accounts from servers, so that you can migrate an account to a different server even after creation.

Both of these will probably have a further decentralising effect.

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