this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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There's much less control about the software.
In a federated system you have no control about wheter remote instances are running up-to-date software or even the same type of software (think Lemmy vs Kbin), which makes breaking changes really hard to impossible, since you never know what ancient version another instance might run.
This is part of the reason why e-Mail works the same now as it did in the 80s. If e-Mail was a centralized service, it would be a full communications- and office-suite now, but since it's federated it's still separate messages in folders and stuff like grouping messages by thread are considered innovative.
Pedantic but email is more like a protocol and not a software. Outlook is the software. It's not a valid example.
ActivityPub might be closer
100%
ActivityPub is a pretty bad example, since it's new. It hasn't had to endure decades of implementations and extensions, like email has. But ActivityPub will be an equal mess given enough time.
Anything that has to be backward compatible for too long will become a mess.
Incidentally, this is one of the biggest complaints from a technical standpoint that many people have with certain Microsoft products.