Federalism is Not Decentralization
Translated from the original Arabic version using Gemini 2.5 Flash. Verified by author.
I’ve noticed a confusion between the concepts of decentralization and federation in Matrix and the Fediverse, and the claim that they are decentralized. Once you understand how they work, it will become clear that this is incorrect.
So, why this confusion? The reason, to my knowledge, is the promotion of this idea on their official websites. On Matrix’s official website, matrix.org, it’s explicitly stated in bold letters, “An open network for secure, decentralized communication.” And on Mastodon’s website, they explain that it is decentralized because there are many servers.
Federated does not mean decentralized
Matrix and the Fediverse are federated networks, which means there is more than one server, and each server includes its users. This differs from decentralization, as in decentralized networks like Nostr, you are not tied to a specific server; rather, you are an independent, an entity that does not belong to any server or authority.
In federated networks, users do not communicate directly with other servers; instead, servers communicate with each other. For example, when you send an email to someone on another email server, you send your email to your server, and your server sends it to the intended server.
In decentralized networks, on the other hand, you communicate directly with servers, and there is no need for an intermediary server to do it for you. In these networks, you cannot send something to a specific person; instead, you send it to the relays/servers that the person uses, and they, in turn, look for posts that mentioned their identifier. This is similar to what happens in federated networks, but in them, you send your post to the person’s server (note: one server), and that person’s server will notify them of the post.
Is federation bad?
Federation is better than centralization, as it gives you the freedom to choose the server you want, and you can also run your own server. If one server goes down, only that specific server will be out of service, and its users will not be able to receive or send messages.
Also, censorship on federated servers is strict; the server owner can block specific people from appearing to you, or block specific servers, but this can be avoided by running your own server.
In centralized social platforms, all posts pass through a single server. If any outage occurs on this server, all users of the platform will be unable to send or receive.
Decentralized networks, on the other hand, are decentralized by nature, meaning that even if one of the servers you use goes down, you will be able to send and receive normally.
Why is it promoted as decentralized?
I believe that “decentralized” in their context means the decentralization of the network as a whole, which is true in federation, as each server is separate. However, all members of the servers are tied to the server they use, and I believe this increases the confusion.
Identity
In centralized platforms, your identity is a unique, non-repeating name, and the platform ensures this. In federated networks, your identity is tied to the server you use. Similar to centralized platforms, the server ensures that the username is unique and then appends it with the server identifier, which is its own domain.
In decentralized networks like Nostr, it’s completely different. There is no central entity that ensures your identifier is unique. Instead, your identity is a public key consisting of 32 bytes that you create yourself. This means that Nostr can contain an incredibly vast number of public keys, to an extent that is difficult to imagine. But to give you a rough idea, the number far exceeds the number of grains of sand on Earth. The number of grains of sand is estimated at 75 followed by 17 zeros, while the approximate number of Nostr keys that can be generated is 115 followed by 75 zeros. Your public key in Nostr is one of these many, many keys, so it’s almost impossible to create a public key that someone else has already used before you.
To clarify, here are the numbers:
- Number of Nostr keys: 115,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
- Number of grains of sand: 75,000,000,000,000,000,000