Gross

I actually do think it’s messed up that we make the ability to drive a car a prerequisite for living in most of the US - especially since our solution ends up being to make the driving test easy enough for everyone, even unsafe drivers, to pass, and then don’t do anything to make sure people continue to be able to drive safely.

They’re not advocating for federation at all, but their criticism of the fediverse is based on it supposedly falling short of the “dream” that everyone or at least every technically able person will host their own server:

In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom.

Federation is a compromise. Rather than everyone hosting their own systems, ideally every technically able person would host a system for themselves and for their friends, and everyone’s systems could connect. If I’m technically able, I can host an “instance” not only for myself but also my loved ones around me. In theory, through federation my friends and family could take back their computing from the conglomerates, by trusting me and ceding power to me to cover the burden of their system administration.

None of the federated systems mentioned are dominated by one big player, and I don’t see why we should expect that to be the trend.

I appreciate the call for democracy, but I think this totally misses the point of federation with it’s complaint that not everybody is going to host their own server. The benefit of federation is not that every individual or small group will run their own server, it’s that there will be multiple server options to choose from so if the one you’re using goes bad you can just switch to another one. Even just getting to an email like system with a few major players and many smaller ones would be a big improvement over a single centralized server, but what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can’t for email.