I think that both decentralized and federated carry some baggage that make them not equal. But really they kind of are the same.
For me federated just puts some ownership outside of the central system, but that is because of my experience with federated identity and auth systems. It's super gross so when I hear federated I cringe.
Decentralized sounds better to me, but I also think of it more as distributed, but that is me reading into it more than I should. Decentralized is more about reducing points of failure that can bring down the whole. Which is cool, but still if I wanted to silence part of the network I could do that. Distributed on the other hand implies replication and sharing. With that model I can take down parts of the network and nothing is lost.
So I think that decentralized and federated are similar, but not the same really. I don't think that either are ideal. I don't really understand the goals of projects like these so I can't say if either path right right.
Do I value a service higher because it's decentralized? (yes, see how much value git, blogs and email have) Do I understand the technical difference? (yes) Do I treat both the same despite understanding that there is a technical difference? (no)
*edit: The question probably should be "Do I value control over my data?" and the answer is that the more capable a person is in the technical sphere the more he values it. Most people aren't and don't want to be capable, so they don't value it at all. That question is the most reasonable interpretation but it doesn't need a poll. You can pretty much ask how much technical skills people have here.
To get started, here is my view (which I don't claim to be particularly authoritative or even correct):
In federated networks user is generally bound to one "server" (in the abstract sense), typically by identity, and that server manages the users resources. In comparison in decentralized networks resources are contributed and consumed in a more of a pooled fashion, and individual users connect to the network instead of their home server.
Alternatively I'd consider federation to be subcategory or implementation method for decentralization. But then I'm not sure what I'd call non-federated decentralized systems. Distributed maybe? That doesn't sound right.
Decentralized: Not centralized, not a single server or provider.
Federated and distributed systems are both decentralized systems.
Federated: Several providers or servers, equal among themselves, but users are tied to one of them, possibly with a mechanism to switch providers, but there's always at any given time a "home server".
Distributed: Peer-to-peer. One user, one node, client and server in one, no providers or servers that users connect to, users connect to "the network". Nodes come and go over the day, so data is necessarily replicated.
My dream social network is distributed at its core, but with a federated overlay that allows people to easily join, and to discover the network and its contents by clearnet web search.
I would look at what-used-to-be-Skype as decentralized and email as federated. I guess email was probably only one of the few federated technologies that was able to survive through times. I cannot imagine any new technology that can survive when there are many good reasons to not standardize.
Yep, decentralized is really nice and would be perfect if everyone just did it, but it's never going to happen so the only model that can have a reasonable chance to take the place of centralized systems is a federated one. It removes all the burden of installation, administration, safeguarding, scaling, etc from the users.
