I think you've made the point yourself, actually. It's even worse if there's only ONE entity in charge, rather than many (as we're seeing from Reddit IMO). There's also the technical advantage of decentralization, server-wise. As someone who has moved over from Reddit to Lemmy on principle (I had no skin in the game), I also think that the federation actually makes a lot of sense, in the long run. I'm definitely here to stay! It doesn't hurt that I was able to keep my username from Reddit (much easier with federation)!

it's way better than just full on centralization, though

Literally nothing humans do is perfect, maybe besides some art or pb&j

The most you'll get is serviceable. I'm enjoying the experience so far. It's like a social experiment.

the torrent analogy is pretty good actually, ISPs can block certain connections so a good chunk of users miss out on the swarm, and the swarm misses out on them. where federation differs from choosing an ISP is it's far easier to switch your provider to this service than it is an ISP.

and where a given instance draws the line on censorship isn't the be all and end all of whether other instances federate with them. as i see it, though my understanding of this comes from mastodon, even if one server decides to properly block another, a third server might chose to limit instead, if at all. there are block lists but that requires a very obvious and widely shared red line on freedom of expression, where there are very few places on the open web where you'll see less censorship than that.

in the end, wherever a given instance draws the line, is far more democratic than other social media sites. it's easier to think that twitter, or reddit, or facebook, is more accountable, because there's at least one guy everybody can point to to blame when something goes wrong, and sure, there'd be something in that, if the scrutiny they get actually changed anything.

The main federated service that pretty-much all Internet users use is email. It's also been around for a long time, and it's much more popular than other old federated services like IRC. So email is a well-understood example of how federation works in practice.

If you use Gmail and you decide that Google is evil, you can switch to Hotmail or any number of other providers, or even run your own mail server, and you can still send email to people who use Gmail.

That helps keep instance owners honest. You've never heard of Gmail and AOL and Hotmail and MIT all getting into a bun-fight over who's evil and cutting off federation with each other, because that doesn't happen. Doing so would piss off their own users, because people on Gmail expect to be able to get email from their mom on AOL and their buddy on Hotmail and the recruiter at the job they're applying to, without interference from Google.

And yes, we can meke new instances that support our beliefs and that doesnt censor our speech, but then again we dont have an evenly distributed userbase.

I think evenly distributed userbase is not necessary on fediverse as long as users has choice to get what they want. Both admins and normal users are also users, they can desire anything, both good and bad. Any admin that wish bad things will see their instance lost users and defederated by the rest of fediverse and any users that disagree with admin choices can move to the other instaces or set up their personal instance. It happens a lot on microblogging-style part of fediverse, a lot of users okay with that and community wise, it is more or less stable there.

Partly it's really a social experiment, it may work, it may not work, at least for me, so far so good. I hope to see decentralisation thrive. If it doesn't that means the market decided that it doesn't work, then let it be.

If you don't like something, don't use it.

Fediverse is effectively just like Reddit actually, but without the admins, which is what cause 95% subreddits to blackout and protest.

Subreddits have drama all the time because of power tripping mods, but redditards can always create new subs.

I can only speak for myself but I like my server and admin and that our server is connected to more people and content out there.