> All of these things have one thing in common: distrust. Some movements come from the distrust of governments or taxation, others come from the distrust of central services.
This isn't framing the problem the fediverse is solving accurately. What fedi solves isn't not trusting anyone, because it's not a fully P2P network. Rather, it's more about having accountability for the services you use. With a massive centralized social media platform like Twitter where it needs to effectively scale up to be able to accommodate the entire world, it's impossible for a service like this to exist without either being run by a government or a corporation. In the US, the two are more or less the same anyways since we've outsourced most of our infrastructure to the private sector and have been doing that for decades. And in the case of a private entity controlling one of these services that need to scale massively, it's effectively impossible for them to not be incentivized to do all the things that make people not trust them -- mining users' data, etc.
On fedi, you know who your server admins are; they're human beings that you can message if you have a dispute with another user, or there's an issue with the service itself, or whatever. If an instance admin does something shitty, they can be held accountable for it and can have their reputation ruined on fedi, which isn't a perfect system since it leads to things like people being defederated unjustly, but I would say it's far more scalable socially to have a patchwork of different small to medium sized servers run by individuals or teams of people rather than faceless corporations that largely automate all of their user-facing interactions (algorithmic bans and support) where it's basically impossible to hold them accountable for anything unless you have millions of dollars to burn in court.
It is true that centralization/decentralization are implementation details for solving a problem, but this is a case of technological solutions not being sufficient for cultural problems and vice versa. Fedi, for all the problems I have with it, is however closer to striking a balance between solving problems on both of these fronts because it returns the internet to being a community-driven network that has its own culture, and has more ability to handle bad actors or failures in the network with federation as opposed to earlier eras in the internet where for example everyone was using their own separate forums and the centralization of the internet onto social media platforms was really an inevitable consequence of that structure of the internet.
This isn't framing the problem the fediverse is solving accurately. What fedi solves isn't not trusting anyone, because it's not a fully P2P network. Rather, it's more about having accountability for the services you use. With a massive centralized social media platform like Twitter where it needs to effectively scale up to be able to accommodate the entire world, it's impossible for a service like this to exist without either being run by a government or a corporation. In the US, the two are more or less the same anyways since we've outsourced most of our infrastructure to the private sector and have been doing that for decades. And in the case of a private entity controlling one of these services that need to scale massively, it's effectively impossible for them to not be incentivized to do all the things that make people not trust them -- mining users' data, etc.
On fedi, you know who your server admins are; they're human beings that you can message if you have a dispute with another user, or there's an issue with the service itself, or whatever. If an instance admin does something shitty, they can be held accountable for it and can have their reputation ruined on fedi, which isn't a perfect system since it leads to things like people being defederated unjustly, but I would say it's far more scalable socially to have a patchwork of different small to medium sized servers run by individuals or teams of people rather than faceless corporations that largely automate all of their user-facing interactions (algorithmic bans and support) where it's basically impossible to hold them accountable for anything unless you have millions of dollars to burn in court.
It is true that centralization/decentralization are implementation details for solving a problem, but this is a case of technological solutions not being sufficient for cultural problems and vice versa. Fedi, for all the problems I have with it, is however closer to striking a balance between solving problems on both of these fronts because it returns the internet to being a community-driven network that has its own culture, and has more ability to handle bad actors or failures in the network with federation as opposed to earlier eras in the internet where for example everyone was using their own separate forums and the centralization of the internet onto social media platforms was really an inevitable consequence of that structure of the internet.