[hollow-moe]

Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users already use it with email without even noticing!

[tsimionescu]

Email is by far the least secure form of communication in common use right now. It's trivial to impersonate others over email, and every MTA that processes your email has access to the full contents, because they are never encrypted except in flight (and except by a few tiny disparate groups using PGP, and even these groups can't authenticate one another). And not for lack of trying, I should add.

[fc417fc802]

Comes across as an ad hominem. Email is insecure due to being dated, having a massive amount of inertia, and being essentially impossible to upgrade in the necessary ways without breaking backwards compatibility. None of that has anything to do with federation vs p2p vs centralization.

If you want a fair comparison for reasoning about security related challenges and tradeoffs you should probably go with matrix.

[direwolf20]

None of this is fundamental to the federated model. It's only because email is older than modern security practices.

[BrenBarn]

People often mention email as an example of federated communication, but the way email works in practice doesn't entirely live up to that ideal. Good luck getting your own self-hosted email server to send emails that actually reach anyone using a major email provider; they'll just be blocked as spam.

In practice, email is much less federated than it seems. A significant proportion of people are just using gmail. You probably don't have to include that many providers to cover a majority of people in the US.

I think federation has promise, but federation in itself is not a solution. Technical approaches do not address the more fundamental issue that, regardless of the mechanics of the system, big players will have more influence on its operation and evolution. Thus we will always need sociopolitical mechanisms to restrict big players.

[patmorgan23]

Federation does at least give you the choice of providers, even a little bit of competition goes a long way to improving a company's behavior.