Alright so I’m not an expert so I might not be explaining it correctly.
Federated Network: Multiple instances sharing content, such as Lemmy
Peer to Peer Network: There is no “instances”, just peers. Many peers sharing content. Every user is a peer. There is no server costs, because every device connected to the network is acting like a mini-server. It will cost your device some storage space and network bandwith depending on the how the software is designed.
Or do you think Centralized servers are still gonna dominate the future?
P2P social networks have a moderation problem. Individual users are all their own moderators, which works like the “block” feature on Lemmy and KBin. However, this can get super exhausting so fast. There’s only so much fascist, homophobic, or transphobic bullshit a person can tolerate in an online interaction before they just give up and leave the network because it feels like there’s nothing worthwhile there.
There may be a solution to this problem someday, but for now, you have a choice for P2P networks. You can give up on user discovery entirely, as in Secure Scuttlebutt, where your network grows as you get invited to follow people or invite people to follow you. Alternatively, you can give up on moderation entirely, as with Nostr. I think either are fatally flawed presently, making federated services the best choice for having good control over your social networking experience without having to do every single part of it yourself.
I wish to see a P2P network with moderation “subscriptions”! So you can subscribe to the “anti-spam list” or “!asklemmy moderation list by @mekhos” or “anti-xenophobic list”. The integrity of each filter list is upheld by its reputation. If a spam list flags too many legitimate users, people have the choice to abandon it. If users of a community (which is just a hashtag) don’t like the direction the mods are steering it, they can resubscribe to a different set of mods.
I think ultimately something like that will be the solution. And maybe it will just be that you can subscribe to any other user’s block list, and perhaps they can in turn subscribe to yours, and basically within your peer 2 peer network the block list(s) are federated. You could potentially even have a block and whitelist where when someone you think shouldn’t get blocked gets blocked you personally white list them, and in the case of conflicting block and whitelists, a consensus based confidence list is created where some users just don’t show in your feed if enough percentage of your block list follows block them vs whitelist them, and users near 50% show in your feed in a collapsed “controversial” mode
Bluesky does this.
The atProtocol has some pretty cool things. I hope ActivityPub can adopt the ability for users to invite others so closed instances can have an invite system