> Mastodon is great as a decentralized Twitter
Federated, not decentralized. Decentralized is peer2peer like torrents. Federated is like email where there are little fiefdoms like Gmail, yahoo, or self-hosted.
Federated, not decentralized. Decentralized is peer2peer like torrents. Federated is like email where there are little fiefdoms like Gmail, yahoo, or self-hosted.
No it doesn’t. Gmail is a centralized instance of a federated network.
You can have a federated node that becomes so popular that it’s basically centralized.
This federated/decentralized distinction is pretty common.
You’re dwelling on literal definitions but there are more semantic differences those words have picked up in the communities involved.
For a long time, federated architecture was seen as special case of decentralized, for example in designing stuff for internal use. It still makes sense in that context.
In the context of larger external facing systems, I've found it useful to think of federated as "partly decentralized", and "decentralized" is short-hand for "fully decentralized".