Federation is an answer to the wrong question

When the latest ills of social media are discussed, someone will inevitably bring up the fediverse - the decentralized ecosystem of alternative social networks like Mastodon - as the miracle cure.

Yet even a decade after its release, Mastodon remains largely unknown outside technical circles. The reality is that the fediverse solves few (if any) problems while introducing many new ones - and it starts with fundamental issues most advocates overlook.

The real problems with mainstream platforms #

Mainstream social media platforms aren’t evil for evil’s sake. Their noxious behaviors stem from a single root cause: an advertising-based business model that prioritizes engagement at the expense of its users.

This manifests as:

• Opaque algorithms that prioritize engagement-maximizing content over user preferences
• Inconsistent moderation that often tolerates offensive content despite user flags because controversy drives engagement
• Privacy invasions (in continued breach of regulations) to enable better ad targeting and engagement optimization
• Lack of interoperability and API access to trap users in official apps that maximize data collection

The real customers aren’t the users but the advertisers, who for a fee can get their content in front of users’ eyeballs. Change the funding model and the incentives for these behaviors disappear entirely, no technical refactor required.

Why Mastodon isn’t the answer #

Mastodon doesn’t address the root cause. It sidesteps the funding question entirely, leaving each instance to figure it out themselves. Most operate through altruism or donations - a model that barely works at small scale and has already seen many instances shut down.

Beyond the funding problem, Mastodon’s creates its own issues - some are inherent to a decentralized model, others are just terrible branding/execution:

• Unappealing branding: who thought “Mastodon” was an appealing name for a consumer product? Or that calling posts “toots” was a good idea? You can’t expect to compete with mainstream platforms when you don’t even get the basics right.

• The concept of “instances”: users must understand instances, choose one, and trust its administrator (who can impersonate them). When instances shut down or administrators go rogue, account portability requires the old instance’s cooperation, which won’t help if it’s gone dark or you’ve been banned.

• Defederation drama: instances can and do defederate each other for political or personal reasons, at which point content stops being exchanged between them. Good luck explaining to non-technical users why they can’t see their friends’ posts nor communicate despite both being on “Mastodon”.

• Rules & moderation inconsistency: each instance sets its own rules, which can change without notice. There’s no consistent moderation policy, meaning users may encounter unwanted or illegal content depending on which instances theirs federates with.

• Resource inefficiency: every instance caches content from other instances resulting in a massive waste of storage resources. It also means illegal content that appears momentarily on one instance gets duplicated across the network, creating potential legal liability for administrators.

• Unclear scalability: the network has no proven business model and I suspect would crumble under mainstream scale. The current approach only works because it’s too small for bad actors to bother attacking.

An actual solution #

The fediverse treats social media’s problems as technical when they’re fundamentally financial. The solution isn’t more technical complexity - it’s fixing the business model and aligning the incentives.

One option is to use regulation to improve existing platforms: enforce privacy laws (which already forbid most practices but are ignored because violations remain profitable), attach liability for algorithmically-promoted content and require interoperability to enable competition.

Another option is to built a better centralized alternative, as a non-profit or public benefit corporation if desired. Compute and hosting is cheaper than ever thanks to technological advances (simply avoid the “cloud” with its ~90x markup on bandwidth), and LLMs make moderation much easier and scalable.

A centralized option makes more sense than federation:

• Significantly cheaper to host, as you don’t have to duplicate content across the whole network
• Consistent branding, rules, and moderation. You should be able to engage a junior product designer for a few days to pick an appealing name
• A legal entity to handle challenges and shield operators from liability from illegal content gets posted (any platform accepting user-generated-content will eventually get some)
• Better user experience without the complexity of instances and technicalities. Onboarding becomes on-par with current mainstream platforms

You can still offer interoperability, open APIs and alternative clients - none of these require federation- they’re policy choices any platform can make regardless of technical implementation.

The masses don’t care about decentralization protocols or technical architecture - those were never their gripes with mainstream social media. To get people to move over you need to solve their actual problems while not introducing new ones. Facebook succeeded not on technicalities but because it offered improved functionality over the then status-quo.

Mastodon and similar projects have zero hope for mainstream adoption because they prioritize technical ideology over solving real user-facing problems.