Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
Yet nearly everyone has an email, and nobody is suggesting we centralize it, because that would be a significantly worse experience for everyone. All of the issues you complain about would also exist in a centralized instance, especially the “use a megacorporation” one, are you suggesting reddit isn’t a megacorporation?
People are actively migrating to centralized communication platforms away from email. Pretty much every messaging application or chat service with mass adoption at the moment is centralized.
I am not suggesting anything, just saying that I don’t know if email is a great example of federation without issues. I think it’s important to be transparent about the downsides of federation as part of the discussion.
Why on earth do you expect your data to be private on a public forum?
Do you not know about archive.org?
There is a difference between expecting something to be private on the internet, and the application you are using respecting your privacy. Archive.org is not run by Lemmy - it is a third party outside of our ability to control. Lemmy can control how it handles deleted and edited content within it’s system. I don’t like how Lemmy handles deleted content for example. I think a delete should be a delete - it should be gone, or anonymized within Lemmy specifically.
Even on reddit, they EXIST to sell your data, privacy is completely nonexistent on public forums, and it never will be, you’re essentially asking users to trust in a benevolent dictatorship on their data.
I have not made that argument. There is also nothing, as far as I can see, that would prevent the owner of a Lemmy instance (or a fork of the Lemmy software) from doing anything you list here. The software license allows for commercial use and doesn’t seem to include any mandates for how instance maintainers interact with user data.
You’re forgetting that you’re comparing to reddit.
People are actively migrating to centralized communication platforms away from email. Pretty much every messaging application or chat service with mass adoption at the moment is centralized.
Matrix is catching on and growing rapidly for a reason. Also, email is still widely used in offices for a reason, have you ever had a job that didn’t send you emails? I haven’t. Have you ever had a job that didn’t utilize emails heavily? I haven’t.
Centralized messaging is used for instant messaging, which is a different usecase than email. I’m sure matrix will overtake the corporate world just like email did, because of the strengths of federation, a company can have an internal messaging client and not have to worry about leaks, and trusting microsoft/whatever company to run their shit well.
I have not made that argument. There is also nothing, as far as I can see, that would prevent the owner of a Lemmy instance (or a fork of the Lemmy software) from doing anything you list here. The software license allows for commercial use and doesn’t seem to include any mandates for how instance maintainers interact with user data.
You’re right, reddit does the same thing, though. You can host your own lemmy instance, and then you’ll be in control of the data. On any other platform, you have no choice beyond trusting the benevolent dictatorship.
If anything that’s a reason to fight for federation, not a reason to fight against it.
Matrix is catching on and growing rapidly for a reason. Also, email is still widely used in offices for a reason, have you ever had a job that didn’t send you emails? I haven’t. Have you ever had a job that didn’t utilize emails heavily? I haven’t.
Centralized messaging is used for instant messaging, which is a different usecase than email. I’m sure matrix will overtake the corporate world just like email did, because of the strengths of federation, a company can have an internal messaging client and not have to worry about leaks, and trusting microsoft/whatever company to run their shit well.
Every company I’ve worked with in the past five years is communicating primarily through Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Slack. Email is typically reserved for meeting invites or communication outside of the company. I run a team of software engineers and we probably use email less than once a month outside of accepting or declining meeting invites. I do hope Matrix catches on and continues to grow.
To follow along with this argument though, if companies wanted federation - wouldn’t they run their own email servers internally instead of outsourcing that out to Microsoft or Google? I don’t think I’ve worked with a company in the last decade that ran it’s own mail servers.
You’re right, reddit does the same thing, though. You can host your own lemmy instance, and then you’ll be in control of the data. On any other platform, you have no choice beyond trusting the benevolent dictatorship.
If anything that’s a reason to fight for federation, not a reason to fight against it.
Do you actually control your data if you host your own Lemmy instance? What’s stopping another Lemmy instances from caching, storing, or using the data for it’s own purposes?
Again, I’m not against federation, I’m literally on Lemmy right now. I’m on Mastodon too. I think federation has benefits. It’s important to be honest and transparent about the pros and cons.
To follow along with this argument though, if companies wanted federation - wouldn’t they run their own email servers internally instead of outsourcing that out to Microsoft or Google? I don’t think I’ve worked with a company in the last decade that ran it’s own mail servers.
I literally have never worked with a company that didn’t use their own email server, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Do you actually control your data if you host your own Lemmy instance? What’s stopping another Lemmy instances from caching, storing, or using the data for it’s own purposes?
Nothing, but you not caring about that contradicts your argument of not caring about archive.org, that’d still be an external server downloading your data, it’s no different.
Again, I’m not against federation, I’m literally on Lemmy right now. I’m on Mastodon too. I think federation has benefits. It’s important to be honest and transparent about the pros and cons.
I don’t think there are any cons EXCEPT that developing a federated option is more complicated, but there are no cons for end-users, all of the cons you listed have much bigger equivalents problems for centralized services.
