Gab Has Become Completely Unstoppable By "Federating" Now They Can't Get Shut Down

submitted by sawboss from (self.DecentralizeAllThings)

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[–]Riva 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

What does federating mean? Link or something to explain it?

[–]sawboss[S] 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

tl;dr It means people can communicate across different networks without necessarily "subscribing" to those networks. It also means a centralized authority can't block or shape such communication. From the wiki article:

In networking systems, to be federated means users are able to send messages from one network to the other. This is not the same as having a client that can operate with both networks, but interacts with both independently. For example, in 2009, Google allowed GMail users to log in to their AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) accounts from GMail. One could not send messages from GTalk accounts or XMPP (which Google/GTalk is federated with—XMPP lingo for federation is s2s, which Facebook and MSN Live's implementations do not support[3]) to AIM screen names, nor vice versa.[4] In May 2011, AIM and Gmail federated, allowing users of each network to add and communicate with each other.

https://infogalactic.com/info/Federation_(information_technology)

If you think censorship on social media is bad, you should care about this.

[–]SierraKiloBravo 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

I use noagendasocial.com which is an instance of Mastodon. The federation is the collective of all Mastodon instances. Like a giant venn diagram, each instance has their own turf, but can also view the rest of the "fediverse" and see what is out there beyond their own wall.

When I log into noagendasocial.com I can see my notifications in one column, the posts from everyone on noagendasocial.com in another column, and posts from the fediverse in another column. With Gab now joining the fediverse, I can now see posts from people posting from their instance in amongst all the posts from all the other instances.

I am not good at explaining things.

[–]HumanBN 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's like if Saidit users could subscribe to subreddits and subverves on Voat and vice versa.

There's already alternatives for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress and on and on.