
Information Civics: Deconstructing Power Structures of Social Computing Networks - walterbell
https://infocivics.com/
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gault8121
Moxie Marlinspike's counter-argument about the perils of federation:
[https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-
moving/](https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

 _" On some level, federation is appealing precisely because it does freeze
protocols in time. It’s great when centralized clients and servers roll out
features that benefit us, but they could just as easily roll out features that
don’t. Federation gives us more collective control over what changes we
accept, but that comes with an unacceptable inability to adapt.

Given that federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider that
the bulk of people use, federation becomes a sort of implicit threat. Nobody
really wants to run their own servers, but they know that it might be possible
if their current host does something egregious enough to make it worth the
effort.

However, over the past six years, we’ve also seen the user cost of switching
between centralized communication services reduced substantially, particularly
given the tendency towards addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone
numbers. The device’s address book is now the social network, so using phone
numbers as an identifier has reduced switching costs by putting a user’s
social network under their control. In a way, the notification center on a
mobile device has become the federation point for all communication apps,
similar to how older desktop IM clients unified communication across multiple
IM networks.

The effect has been visible in the messaging space, where market leaders have
come and gone, new popular apps come out of nowhere, and even the most
successful players seem compelled to continue iterating and improving their
services as quickly as possible.

This reduced user friction has begun to extend the implicit threat that used
to come with federated services into centralized services as well. Where as
before you could switch hosts, or even decide to run your own server, now
users are simply switching entire networks. In many cases that cost is now
much lower than the federated switching cost of changing your email address to
use a different email provider.

An open source infrastructure for a centralized network now provides almost
the same level of control as federated protocols, without giving up the
ability to adapt. If a centralized provider with an open source infrastructure
ever makes horrible changes, those that disagree have the software they need
to run their own alternative instead. It may not be as beautiful as
federation, but at this point it seems that it will have to do."_

