Easy examples of decentralized services you already intuitively understand are phones and email. You can call anyone on any number, even if you and the person you’re calling buy phone service from different companies. Same with email. Even if pretty much everyone you know uses Gmail, there’s nothing materially different about emailing with the Yahoo and Hotmail holdouts in your life. And maybe your friend Jane runs her own email server and her address is jane@janerox.com.
That’s it. That’s how “the fediverse,” or federated services, work too. You join a server, and you’re trusting that server with your data. But then you can communicate with all the other servers running the same protocol, and the only data everyone on all those other servers can see from you is the content you choose to put out there.
Decentralization doesn’t change the basic functions of a social network, and that’s fine. The whole point of these services is to be a platform for publicly posting and consuming information. They aren’t designed around implementing end-to-end encryption. The servers still have access to user data and can be subpoenaed by governments or hacked.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of their users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who their users follow in the broader fediverse.
“I am perhaps equal parts excited and apprehensive to see how things play out with Threads, but it is really underlining the beauty of the fediverse that you have every option and the opportunity to choose,” Schulman says. “If you like Meta and you want to be in there, great. Go join Threads, you’ll be happy there, and you’ll also have access to everything else. If you don’t want to be a part of Meta, but you’ve got friends or family that do or public figures or whatever, then fine.