Re:Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and it...
by zrm on Sunday April 01, 2018 @12:55AM
(#16726797)
You're thinking of distributed. Decentralized is broader than that. Really anything that isn't centralized like Facebook is.
Obviously a lot of this is very squishy and overlaps a lot even within the same system.
Look at DNS. It's nominally a centrally-rooted hierarchy, but the root is operated by consensus rather than monarchy, so how do you classify that? Then each domain can be operated by a separate organization, so essentially federated but not exactly because it's still a hierarchy. Meanwhile the recursive resolvers and caches are fully distributed -- use any of them and the results are (supposed to be) the same.
(General note)
Federated is a bit different from decentralised. For example, email is federated, but not decentralised. In a federated network, if "your service providing server" is down (like gmail.com), then you don't have service, though others on other parts of the network would continue to have service. With a decent sized network, there is no "your service providing server" and other machines can take over when one fails. Decentralisation always goes along with redundancy whereas federation doesn't require redundancy.