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·
    1 year 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·
      1 year ago

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

      • livus@kbin.social
        4·
        1 year 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·
          1 year 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·
        1 year 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] .