I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn’t come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they’re either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I’m on Bluesky too, but once that goes I’ll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.

But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?

  • Zozano@aussie.zoneEnglish
    60·
    23 hours ago

    The classic example is email; Imagine if you could only email people on Outlook, from another Outlook account. It’s intuitive how shitty that would be, but for some reason we give social media a free pass for doing exactly this.

    The benefits are (analogously):

    • if you notice Yahoo users send you a lot of spam, you just block all of Yahoo. Sure, you might miss something important, but that’s their fault for using Yahoo.
    • if some dickhead like The Zucc releases a new email service (Threads) then maybe your email service (instance) will do you a favor and block them (defederate).
    • pedos and bigots look for instances which is known for hosting shady shit, effectively acting as a containment barrier (most instances defederate these by default). Would never see that happen on Twitter (thank you Elon! /s).
    • if an instance crashes, that sucks. But there are many others hosting federated content, so Lemmy will never be ‘down’.