I get it that things can have unfortunate names, but I’ve seen a lot of people proudly claim lemmy is “federated” or a “federation”. Isn’t a federation actually against what people want out of the fediverse?

Like, a federation in governments is about a bunch of otherwise self-governing states under a centralized government. Like the US, that’s a federation.

isn’t the whole point of the fediverse that it’s anti-centralization? Then why do people call it a federation positively? That sounds like the last thing I’d want it to be.

I think a confederation would work, but that’s not what I see people going for. Is that what it’s actually intended to be and people just call it the wrong thing?

Imo Reddit is more of a federation than the fediverse, since the subreddits are self-governing communities until the admins demand them to change something.

  • ono
    7·
    11 months ago

    You’re assuming that the word federation means central governance over the component parts. It doesn’t. That’s just an element that happens to be present in well-known political federations, which are not the only kind.

    When I think of federation, the defining feature is not control, but co-operation.

    • Pamasich@kbin.socialOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      I mean, without a central governance, just cooperation, isn’t it just a confederation then?

      • livus@kbin.social
        4·
        11 months ago

        I think the problem here is you see “federation” as a political term and perhaps you don’t realise that “federation” as an information technology term has a different meaning.

        A federation is a group of computing or network providers agreeing upon standards of operation in a collective fashion.

        The term may be used when describing the inter-operation of two distinct, formally disconnected, telecommunications networks that may have different internal structures.[1] The term “federated cloud” refers to facilitating the interconnection of two or more geographically separate computing clouds

        • Pamasich@kbin.socialOP
          3·
          11 months ago

          Oh, that would be it then, yeah. In hindsight, I should have asked chatgpt about this first, that would have probably told me about this. I did check google, but it only gave me information on federation in politics, so I assumed that’s the only thing there is.

          This makes perfect sense then, thanks for clearing that up!

      • ono
        3·
        11 months ago

        I think what we have here is more than just confederation, because the parts aren’t merely allied, but also function as a larger unit.

        This question might fuel some discussion over on [email protected] .