Not one network — many separately-run ones, agreeing to speak the same language, or trust each other, so they behave like a single system.
A platform like X or Instagram is centralised by design: one company owns every server, every account, and the rules for all of it, which is exactly what gives it the power to change those rules, sell the data, or disappear the product overnight. A decentralised, or federated, social network splits that ownership apart: independent operators run their own servers, each with their own community and moderation, all speaking a shared protocol so a user on one server can still follow and interact with someone on another. A 2019 measurement study of Mastodon, one of the largest federated networks, documented both the promise and the practical friction of this model in the wild — real independence from any single company, at the cost of the seamlessness a single centralised platform can guarantee.
The same pattern generalizes past social media to money itself: a federated financial system — separate, self-governing circles (a family, a friend group) that hold their own reserve and operate on their own trust, without a single central bank or platform owning the whole arrangement — trades the same things a federated network does. What’s gained is resilience against any one node’s failure or betrayal; what’s given up is the seamlessness (single unit of account, single rulebook, easy movement between groups) that a fully centralised system provides by default. The Mastodon study’s finding, real independence at the cost of guaranteed interoperability, describes both cases with the same words.
Source: Raman, A., Joglekar, S., De Cristofaro, E., Sastry, N. & Tyson, G. (2019), “Challenges in the Decentralised Web,” Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2019), 217–229.