Comment by prisenco

To clarify, I don't mean big P Politics, I mean political in the sense that each node is owned and operated separately, which means there are competing interests and a need to coordinate between them that extends beyond the technical. Extrapolated to N potential nodes creates a lot of conflicting incentives and perspectives that have to be managed. And if the network ever becomes concentrated in a handful of nodes or even one of them which is not unlikely, then we're effectively back at square one.

| if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad

It's important to note we're optimizing for different things. When I say third-order social effects, it means the way that engagement algorithms and virality combine with massive scale to create a broadly negative effect on society. This comes in the form of addiction, how constant upward social comparison can lead to depression and burnout, or how in extreme situations, society's worst tendencies can be amplified into terrible results with Myanmar being the worst case scenario.

You assume centralization means total monopolization, which neither Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or anyone has been able to do. You may lose access to a specific audience, but nobody has a right to an audience. You can always put up a website, blog, write for an op-ed position at your local newspaper, hold a sign in a public square, etc. The mere existence of a centralized system with moderation is not a threat to freedom of speech.

Federation is a little bit more resilient but accounts can be blacklisted, and whole nodes can be blacklisted because of the behavior of a handful of accounts. And unfortunately, that little bit of resilience amplifies the problem of spam and bots, which for the average user is much bigger of a concern than losing their account. Not to mention privacy concerns, which is self-evident why an open system is more difficult than a closed one.

I'll concede that "worse" was poor wording, but intractable certainly wasn't. These problems become much more difficult to solve in a federated system.

However, most advocates of federation aren't interested in solving the same problems as I am, so that's where the dissonance comes from.