# Federation support for Discourse

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** completed
**Created:** [June 28, 2018, 5:32am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921 "2018-06-28T05:32:10Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 12

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2018, 4:36am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921/12 "2018-08-06T04:36:48Z")

</div>

> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> I’m unclear how viable Mastodon is in terms of it being a real competitor to a massively centralized service like Twitter – as I understand it, Mastodon is a Twitter clone, but decentralized?

Here is a nice explainer

> **[How Does Mastodon Work? - Kev Quirk](https://kevq.uk/how-does-mastodon-work/)**
>
> I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.

I still think this is so intrinsically hard and so difficult to get working at scale that I feel anyone taking this on is falling into [a kind of Xanadu trap](https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-xanadu-dream/) — the more effort you spend traveling toward it, the farther away the goal gets.

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921)._