Technology

Decentralization solves some problems, sure, but it creates new and arguably worse problems. Let's take Lemmy for example. Power hungry mods can and do still ban you from communities that you've never interacted with and there's nothing you can do about it. They can and do still remove your posts when they didn't actually break any rules and there's nothing you can do about it. There's still only really 1 big community per topic, because having a dozen tiny communities that all repost the same things but only have a dozen different people commenting on each one just doesn't work, which leads straight back to having centralized social media with centralized mods who control the narrative and bans.

The point of social media is to interact with people, and splitting up a topic over a dozen tiny barely used instances isn't a better way of doing that than having one big centralized one. The only real benefit of decentralized social media is that it can't just disappear because one company turned it off.

Reddit turned into a complete shitshow of power abusing mods, agendas being pushed, and circle jerk safe spaces for a particular political sides followers.......but almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are.

Then there's the federation/defederation issue, where the instance you signed up to won't allow you to access some other instances and their communities because the owners/admins don't want you to, yet if you make another account on a different instance and don't hide that you're the same person as the other account, some mods will then ban you for "alt accounts" lol. Much like how reddit had no problem with alt accounts, but some mods and later admins did.

Most people don't care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That's why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That's why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn't allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it's a "right leaning" platform and looking for other places.

Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation. Some of us believe that self moderation is all that's needed - if you don't like what someone is saying, just block them and move on. Don't call for their opinion to be silenced and their access to be taken away.