The idea of federation, as a software terminology, means not having centralized online platforms for content creation, code hosting (software forges), and other experiences.
This collection of online federalized services is called the Fediverse.
If you are not tech-y enough to have ever learnt about federations in-depth, you will likely think - why do we need federated online services? Facebook, Instagram - or for fellow developers, GitHub - are decent services that have already been provided for us at a great price, often free. Don’t we all like free stuff?
But perhaps think again. In a for-profit society, nothing is ever provided out of the goodness of their hearts - if it’s free, you are the commodity. It’s a sad fact, but it is quite true. If you have been online for the past few years, you would not be alien to the fact that unwanted advertising is everywhere. Everything everywhere all at once.
For someone that does give half of a f- about their privacy, or for whom enjoys sticking it up to the big corporate guys, a federated online society is a quite interesting venture. The idea is that every home server talks to each other through a set of federated API standard. This way, instead of everyone having to register an account on every other homeserver’s sign-in logic, a shared identity linked to your own homeserver can be used to access every federalized site. Despite sounding incredibly niche, this is the better way.
Yep, most federated instances are done by hosting one yourself. A portion are using online service providers, aka. DigitalOcean, AWS, et cetera. But many are home-labs, out of Bangladesh, Brunei, Belgium, or any other of the ~200 countries in the world. When I hosted my Matrix home-server, it struggled to talk to every other home server on the Internet, since each one has to be “dialed” to access its information. Some may be well-maintained, but others are not. In a federalized environment, we are assuming that everyone can take ample care of and make provisions to secure their homeservers, and that may be asking for too much.
That creates the core issue that makes federations more difficult to use than centralized services, but in a mildly contradictory way, also what makes them innovative and privacy-conscious: You preserve a right, and responsibility, to control your data.
There is often an issue when it comes to having a well-sized online federation – cost. For a home user to have a server capable of federalized services, they at least need to have a public address accessible to talk to everyone else on the Internet, so that the Fediverse can grow one member stronger.
The issue arises when we think about who actually controls Internet Protocol (IP) resources. While service providers in the developed world have an abundance of IPv4 addresses to abusively price and redistribute, places with a large population struggle substantially with allocating public v4 addresses to individuals in need.
Fair enough, it is right now a niche resource. But the purpose of the Internet, as envisioned by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is for a decentralized environment where information can be freely shared without hinderances. Increasing IPv6 rollout across the globe is a step in the right direction, but as a society, we can do more than that.
Capitalistic walled gardens & a fanatical obsession with social control.
Don’t even get me started on registering a domain in China, it’s the most amount of red tape you will ever come across on the Internet. This by itself prevents a substantial self-hosting community forming in the Chinese Internet environment. Indeed, there is a greater political climate in play here, but that’s talk for another day. But even outside the walled hell, things do not look so great in the wider Internet of today. With stable computing resources restricted in the hands of the few, it is easier for us to opt into an online social service rather than federalizing with our own homeservers.
Made with ❤ and at Delft, the Netherlands.