> Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers
I'm all for real standards, and believe W3C has acted in good faith, but in what shape is W3C's standardization process now (hint: they cancelled the HTML 5.3 and SVG 2 spec) and where has it lead us?
As its name hints the Consortium is intended as a way for organisations to work together. This seemed like a natural fit for the Web which had all these exciting startups in the Valley and around the world. If you look at something like the IETF where notionally all participation is individual and organisations are acknowledged only as the employer of an individual contributor you see plenty of stuff getting done that is blatantly, even explicitly, done on behalf of that employer. So why not cut out the middle man?
But it turns out that's probably the wrong shape. While some stuff at IETF would get done by "any Google employee" or "any Microsoft employee" or "any Cisco employee" plenty of stuff that actually gets done is because one or more specific people cared about it, regardless of their employer or occasionally even if they don't have one.
For years it was literally impossible to work on W3C standards as an individual. They eventually fixed that, but the message sent echoes forever, "Go away, we don't care".
I like Tim (he is a nerd, he used to derail our apparently serious board-level meetings with his IT problems), but my impression is that one of the things that lead to the W3C was that Tim could see from pretty early on (certainly by the time W3C is founded) that there's a lot of cash sloshing about for his Web, and of course it's the nature of the beast that Tim doesn't automatically get a slice. That's part of the reason other systems didn't get traction - nobody wants to pay a toll. The W3C is a way for Tim to get some of that money for his pet projects.
Where we are now is not necessarily where the standardisation process has led us. There's a very powerful tech oligopoly that has taken over some time ago.
I'm not sure there's anything the W3C alone could have done to prevent that, even if they hadn't made any of the mistakes they have made.
You know _why_ they cancelled HTML 5.3, right? A different group had (what the world at least concluded was) better ideas for HTML5, took the spec, declared it "living" rather than versioned, and declared itself the authority on HTML. For a while that meant we had _two_ HTML 5 specs, at odds with each other, and eventually W3C had no choice but to acknowledge their coup had succeeded (for better or for worse) because the world ended up siding with WhatWG instead of W3C.
WHATWG formed as an initiative of browser vendors to collaborate on new browser functionality and other stuff that needed coordination, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem now is this has led the web stack to be defined by a closed club with fewer and fewer members, with incentives not necessarily aligned with users.
But the web isn't just a browser vendor's gamble; it's used for vital communication and documentation in business, education, administration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. If we want to depend on the web (and spend billions on it), then there ought to be some representation and participation, since there clearly is public interest, and possibly funding. Maybe people looked at W3C to organize these interests, but indeed W3C has failed this expectation by statue.
What they're doing instead is publishing redacted WHATWG snapshots (and have announced to not even do any redaction in the future). In other words, they're publishing work-in-progress collaborative documents without significant contributions and editorial. Having a point of reference is still something I guess (I'm even basing my HTML 5.x SGML DTDs on W3C's snapshots [1]) but not advancing the interest of web users, which W3C should have made their goal.
This seems a false, or at least uninformed, statement. WhatWG is just as closed as W3C was: the discussions are public, and anyone can contribute to them. Is there a hurdle that you need to overcome to show you actually care enough before you're allowed to participate? Sure. But it's the kind of hurdle that anyone with an email address can overcome. You're not excluded just because you don't work for "a browser vendor".
Also, it feels like you're confusing the end user with the developers. Business, education, admininstration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. are all fields that rely on the web _through_ browsers and browser components, made by browser vendors. Whether that's IE6, or WebKit, or Electron, or Android Webview. So yes: the browser vendors are absolutely the people primarily pulling the strings, and pushing the envelope, which makes a whole lot of sense: it's their collective product they're curating.
Decentralisation will never happen on a scale that will affect significant web traffic.
However, there is another model for web apps, not purely decentralised, but a practical option where traffic is not funnelled through a small number of big players. Let's call it the WordPress model.
Consider the following: WordPress is an example of a profitable open source app that can easily be installed on countless shared hosting platforms or on a VPS. It's easy to switch hosting providers when you want to (rather than be locked into one provider). You can take your data with you when you switch. The popularity of WordPress means that one-click installs are widespread. Many providers also offer a 'managed' service where they take care of back-up and updates. But crucially you're still not tied to a single provider.
Now imagine if all web apps were as easy to install on the server via a one-click installation like WordPress. Unfortunately, there is no common standard or API for software installation on the server side, and this lack of an easy installation process for everyone severely limits self-hosting websites and apps.
Many developers think deploying a server-side web app is a non-issue, or they erroneously think that installing Cloudron/providing Docker instances/typing command line instructions are all "easy". Have you seen the server deployment instructions for "web friendly" languages like Ruby and Python? They're ludicrously complicated. Developers are completely blind to the complexity and see nothing wrong in such installation procedures.
The result is ever-growing centralised software through the SaaS model which beats the self-hosting alternative in simplicity every single time. Imagine if your local desktop apps were completely controlled, tracked and even terminated remotely by one provider - don't like the though of that? Yet, that is exactly what the centralised Saas model enables and nobody blinks an eye.
I wish there was some momentum or traction in making server-side web app installation as universally simple as a one-click WordPress install for all for all web apps. It would unlock countless opportunities for developers to reach more users or customers. I'm not one for conspiracies, but I wonder sometimes if developers actually prefer the complexity of server-side installation because it makes selling a SaaS solution much more attractive over the ludicrously complicated self-hosting option.
I find the steps I have to go through to install stuff that I expect thousands of other people must be installing at the same time on a cloud service ridiculously complicated. The same with most tasks.
I do however find them doable and maybe also a kind of job security for that reason. But I don't prefer them. I want to build stuff, not do a bunch of prep work every time I want to build stuff.
Decentralisation isn't a collection of technology. Rather, it's a set of principles or tenets. It's above all the by-product of the choices one makes.
Sure, you can install a gazillion packages, use serverless, static site generators, SaaS platforms, install CMS x, y or z.
But then again, you can still use a simple FTP program, copy HTML files over TCP/IP to a remote server with a process running in the background that listens for incoming HTTP requests. Your browser will still be able to from the HTML it receives via a HTTP response. In fact, you don't need a browser. Curl or Telnet will yield a string of text characters any human can read.
Those basic protocols still exist after 30 years and underpin the Web. Nothing changed fundamentally, when you dig deep.
As such, you could lease a shared hosting somewhere and put up your own set of HTML pages and slap a DNS domain to the IP of the server. Boom. Congratulations. You own a website now.
Decentralisation - at it's core - is about ownership. If you put content and data on a host, who owns that? You or the owner of the host? This is where the entire discussion becomes a legal debate.
The big shift of the past decade is that social media offer easy access to centralised hosts they own. This has caused a massive influx of users to publish stuff on hosts that are owned by others.
Meanwhile, there's this perception that you need a gazillion tools to build a website. That you need deep knowledge of languages and such to publish HTML formatted content on a host you own.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Unless you are a business, or an organisation and you need to manage tons HTML formatted content, you can do away with a text editor, basic HTML and shared hosting you pay a tuppence for.
The only reason why things got complex because of business reasons.
>Decentralisation - at it's core - is about ownership. If you put content and data on a host, who owns that? You or the owner of the host? This is where the entire discussion becomes a legal debate.
Your analysis that "ownership of data" being the core tenet of decentralization is incorrect. Consider the 3 major examples of centralization complaints:
- Youtube is too centralized. A decentralized alternative is PeerTube. Is this about ownership? No because Youtube's TOS specifically says the uploader to Youtube retains ownership of the content.[1]
- Twitter is too centralized. A decentralized alternative is Mastodon. But it's not about ownership of data. The Twitter TOS says the user retains copyright ownership of the tweets.[2]
- Facebook is too centralized. But again, the various decentralized alternatives do not change the terms of content ownership. Facebook TOS says the user keeps ownership.[3]
What the 3 examples show is that data ownership isn't the issue. The real issues of centralized services are power and audience reach.
If a musician writes an original song and films an music video, and then uploads it to Youtube, the musician retains the data ownership and the intellectual copyrights. Because intellectual property ownership wasn't transferred, Youtube can be seen as a glorified content-delivery-network cache. (And there's the rub... that so-called "cdn" of Youtube has attracted a billion eyeballs.) That means there are different issues that motivates decentralisation; e.g. the power to filter/rank/recommend/censor/demonetize videos. The concentration of massive audience reach in Youtube's centralized service that makes the musician's decision to host his music video on his own home server irrelevant.
I think those 3 examples should trigger a rethink of your mental framework that led you to conclude data ownership is the main issue.
[1] excerpt from https://www.youtube.com/t/terms : 6.C - For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, [...]
[2] excerpt from https://twitter.com/en/tos : You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content).
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, [...]
[3] excerpt from https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms : "You own the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and the other Facebook Company Products you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want.
However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a ‘license’) to use this content. This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above.
Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, [...]
Not true, and there is many technologies, both new and established, which are fundamentally decentralized. Bittorrent is the first example that springs to mind. Cryptocurrencies are another example, etc.
The article, if seen as criticism of decentralization in general, would be a big straw-man.
But the actual thesis of the author is that you can't decentralize "everything" (the HN title has the straw man though). Even in successful decentralized networks, some aspects (usually governance) stay or become centralized. The author easily succeeds in making that point because everyone already agrees with it.
Whether that's a problem worth discarding the whole movement towards decentralization is mostly a matter of preconceived opinions.
Imagine if someone said, "competitive markets aren't always possible, and over-saturated markets are usually bad for consumers anyway. Therefore, people who advocate for more competition with ISPs or who try to block mergers are just being unrealistic. A competitive market just isn't possible at scale."
Yet plenty of people will argue that Git's goals around decentralization ultimately failed just because Github is convenient and widely used. Or that because social media platforms often naturally trend towards centralization, that efforts like Mastadon are bad for consumers and are a waste of time.
That many real-world decentralized systems have some centralized parts shouldn't be seen as unusual, and it isn't some kind of killing blow to people who advocate for more decentralization. This is the world working as expected.
If the only two states of government possible were anarchy and totalitarianism, then totalitarianism might be the better choice. But those aren't the only two governments possible. Similarly, decentralization is not a binary state. You can use centralization and decentralization in tandem to cover for the flaws and gaps of functionality that both strategies have.
Technically it can. You just have to use alternate old school advertising practices to get discovered. Radio/television spots, word-of-mouth, Billboard, etc...
The very fact you think it is impossible to reach end users without using Google should highlight just how much they have cornered the market.
Remember, internet search was not always a given, and the worked just fine.
I wonder if the case isn’t that we don’t allow new technologies to be truly decentralized. Email and web came from a time before... our market/startup forces in play today may not yield a new, true decentralization because the urge to monetize is stronger now than before.
BitTorrent the protocol is decentralized but again when one of the largest torrent sites goes down it shows. That the protocol was decentralized didn’t make the usage pattern decentralized because it’s so convenient with centralization. And the same again with git: when github goes down we see that a distributed version control protocol isn’t very different from a centralized one if we all use centralized servers and usage patterns (which almost everyone does).
On the github point, agree that I've never come across a non centralised workflow with git - what are the decentralised git workflows?
The issues involved with everyone pulling from everyone, dealing with merge conflicts, etc in a distributed way with no agreed upon, central, source of truth seems fairly implausible for any reasonably sized team but I'd love to know if there are gitflow style workflows for this that make it easier than it first appears.
> I've never come across a non centralised workflow with git
Even in centralized workflows, the decentralized core of Git makes things better.
You've never had a central repository go down and then pulled from the person sitting next to you? At the last organization I worked with, this happened multiple times. And when Microsoft bought Github and a bunch of people panicked, a lot of them were able to move to Gitlab (even without deleting their Github repos) specifically because the technology behind Git allowed you to add multiple remotes.
The article makes the point:
> No system is simply decentralized, full-stop. We shouldn’t expect any to be.
Git is the same way. Even with Linux, where patches are sent around using Email and there is no central repository that has every in-progress effort, there's still ultimately one person signing off on the final release. But that doesn't mean that there aren't decentralized parts of Git that are very, very useful, specifically because they are decentralized or because they allow you to fall back to decentralized workflows when necessary.
One of the things this article is getting at is that people treat decentralized as a binary state -- you either have one source of truth that coordinates everything, or you have complete chaos. Most decentralized systems are in the middle; they allow centralization, but also support fallbacks for when that centralization fails.
Git's branch strategy is another good example of this. Most Git systems use a master branch. But the value of branching is that you can have diverging code states that aren't yet centralized into a single location. You can fork off of master and have a completely parallel codebase, if for some reason you need to. You can have your release in a decentralized state for a week, where multiple people are working on separate branches and there is no single branch that has everyone's changes, and then you can re-centralize everything to master or a staging once you feel comfortable with the features you want.
If github goes down you upload your repo to gitlab and are back in action within 5min. The issue isn't git, but the fact that github does a lot more than just git (issue tracking, push requests and so on) and all of that other stuff centralized.
There is in theory nothing that prevents an issue tracker to be decentralized in the same way git is, but so far that hasn't materialized. You can export issues from github as .json, which allows you to transfer some things over, but users only have a username in those bug reports, not an email, which makes it impossible to contact them after a move to gitlab.
> BitTorrent the protocol is decentralized but again when one of the largest torrent sites goes down it shows.
When one of the largest torrent sites go down, the torrents do not go down with them. You can still seed them and indeed many people continue doing that. Others can still download them provided they have the torrent file or the magnet links. These sites are usually archived, you can still have access to such magnet links. Plus, there are many torrent search engines, and so forth. You can use as many trackers as you want, or none! These torrent sites are really just aggregators for better discoverability. Plus there are trackerless torrents nowadays that use DHT in which every peer acts as a tracker. This is called decentralized tracking, a trackerless system. I do not think that comparing this to git or GitHub makes any sense.
Decentralization is good when there is no need for coordination. We sometimes like to collaborate - but we don't like the constant requirement of mandatory coordination. Unfortunately technology connects us more and more and that means that coordination and un-coordination brings more and more externalities (positive and negative respectively).
Decentralization works in cases that are like we were back to the near empty savannah and where everybody could just go in his own direction. The Internet was once like that - but it is not any more, it is rather the reverse.
By the way, just a few hours ago I submitted to HN this article: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html - it is about these tensions between our freedom to do whatever we like and the need for coordination in a more and more connected world.
I’m surprised IPFS hasn’t been mentioned. It’s a great example of compromise. IPNS tries to replace DNS but it’s slow so the compromised and allowed DNSLink. It’s a great application of decentralization. I want some bits that hash to X and I don’t care who gives them to me.
Decentralization and devolution are often confused. For instance, in the US Civil War, the splintering could be described as devolution. But it certainly wasn't decentralizing power to the slaves. Which side was the side of "decentralization?" It's almost a meaningless question, unless being very well defined.
Obviously, the Pareto Principle is usually at work, even if protocols are decentralized by design. Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice.
Even if one were to capture political control and attempt to redesign governance to be decentralized, there would still be a type of natural selection process for systems which seek to reproduce and expand, by all possible means including violence.
And decentralization and non-violence are also different, as well. Decentralized collective violence is common.
> Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice.
Why do you say that? I see email as an example of very successful decentralisation. GMail etc. have a large share of the market but they don't dominate it, and the different providers interoperate very well.
Most markets exhibit oligopolistic competition, and email is no exception.
Google controls the most, yes, but they aren't the only ones to consider. The number of competitors who are significant players are only a handful. The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email.
Email being an open protocol allows interoperability and lowers barriers to entry, and all of that is good, but power is still concentrated into the hands of a few players nonetheless.
Yes, for example even though gmail dominates, some percentage of users are using other clients. They’ve tried to push users to the gmail client with extra features like automatic sorting, but mostly it’s been a pain in the ass.
We’ve experienced some fake outs with applications like Twitter and Slack which first appeared they were going to allow other clients, and then closed off their systems when reaching a point they didn’t think they needed them anymore.
> The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email.
I don't think this is true. At least, it wasn't true in 2016 according to this (https://email-verify.my-addr.com/list-of-most-popular-email-...), these figures (https://emailclientmarketshare.com) for email clients in 2019 don't suggest a massive change, and anecdotally it seems unlikely -- a lot of people use addresses from university or work.
Certainly it is more centralised than say the automotive industry. But it seems much more similar to that than operating systems, browsers, social networks etc..
> > The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email. I don't think this is true. At least, it wasn't true in 2016 according to this (https://email-verify.my-addr.com/list-of-most-popular-email-...), these figures (https://emailclientmarketshare.com) for email clients in 2019 don't suggest a massive change, and anecdotally it seems unlikely -- a lot of people use addresses from university or work.
> Certainly it is more centralised than say the automotive industry. But it seems much more similar to that than operating systems, browsers, social networks etc..
But those addresses from university or work are increasingly just gsuite deployments.
I have experienced this firsthand in enterprise :)
However, I think the tide is turning with universities. Enterprise will be longer I think largely because of Excel (so might as well have O365, might as well add Outlook, etc).
>The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email.
>Email being an open protocol allows interoperability and lowers barriers to entry, and all of that is good, but power is still concentrated into the hands of a few players nonetheless.
Power? In email? How exactly is that power exercised? What effect does 5 providers accounting for a majority of email have?
As far as I can tell, it has only caused too much HTML email.
>For instance, in the US Civil War, the splintering could be described as devolution. But it certainly wasn't decentralizing power to the slaves.
it was decentralizing in the sense that secession was meant to grant political authority to local elites. 'devolution' just sounds like a moral judgment, which while fair is not very useful for these purposes.
devolution implies a return to a previous, lower level of sophistication. since the US was not previously split into two regional political structures, it's not an accurate descriptor, so it sounds more like an attack on the legitimacy of such an order. critiques of the legitimacy of the confederacy are typically moral in nature.
I thought it just meant to delegate power from a higher level of government to more local governments. I don’t recall ever seeing it used to imply any sort of backward movement.
you're kinda both right. in the specific context of governance, it means what you said with no particular negative connotation. in more general use, it is often used to mean a transition to some more degenerate state. you can see this in the more commonly used "devolve".
as an aside, it's interesting to note that a similar thing happens with the word "degenerate". usually it means inferior, primitive, etc., but in mathematics it has no such connotation (eg, a degenerate triangle where the vertices are collinear).
Devolution is a term in political science that refers to the ceding of power from central authorities to local authorities.
I'm distinguishing that from the general term of decentralization, because from an individualist viewpoint, devolution can result in a consolidation of power. If an autocratic regime secedes from a large democratic republic, for instance.
EDIT: I see you've already retracted the comment. Nevermind :)
The author of the article wrote a book ‘Everything for Everyone’ that looks interesting. It is about organizing coops as a push back against the gig economy or large corporations.
My first job was at what was essentially a huge coop: the 100% employee owned defense contractor SAIC. SAIC spoiled me for all other jobs I had because there was a good vibe and efficiency that came with all employees having a strong motivation for the long term success of the company. After I left SAIC, it eventually became a public company and changed its name to Leidos.
I worked for SAIC before and after the Leidos split. It may have been a 100% employee-owned "coop", but it was clear that some employees got more out of the success than others. And it was always a government contractor like all of the other contractors out there.
Also, nice tidbit about SAIC. It seems that many coops get coopted. Suggesting there's some as yet unknown magic sauce that makes some coops more durable.
I'm very interested in comparative governance models. All tips, links welcome.
I just want someone to point at some real world working organizations.
Kinda like how QA obsessives study the Toyota Production System.
--
I joined a FOSS project structured as multi-org consortium (Kuali) explicitly to learn how they work. (It didn't.)
Richard Wolff's book Democracy at Work advocates WDSE (IIRC, worker directed social enterprises). But, sadly, while Wolff's works are descriptive, he hasn't (yet?) gotten into case studies and prescriptive works.
In the USA, the SEIU and other unions are funding misc coops. IIRC, coops currently employ 1.4m workers. I haven't had the gumption to contact the principals to see how they're doing.
Have you read anything by Pieter Hintjens, the creator of ZeroMQ?
He wrote quite a lot on organising people, particularly software development, but instead of focusing on how to make people efficient, he focused on how to organise the group to protect from opportunistic outsiders / psychopaths coming in and taking personal advantage and destroying the group in the process.
After having his early work ruined several times by other people taking unearned credit, taking money out, causing projects to fail, ZeroMQ was organised around his ideas.
“Coops that get coopted” or are less durable, might be failing to protect their structure well enough.
you guys are rediscovering the birth of "in-group socialism"
just make sure that anyone who wants can join (by complying), otherwise if people are left out by definition from joining (can't change property X) you're just recreating "national socialism"
The story of life on earth generally and human civilisation generally is one of constant adaptations between parasites and predators and the defenders against parasites and predators.
Ecology and population biology are fascinating sources of ideas in this regard.
I read Social Architecture (after my Kuali experience). It's very good. In my head, it sits alongside Clay Shirky (eg Here Comes Everyone).
Whenever questions like "how do I make money working on open source?" and "which license should I use?" comes up, I expect Hintjens' wisdom to be at the top.
Alas. I'd cite Hintjens myself, but I have yet to put his wisdom to practice, so I'd be just another poseur.
I also read his writings about health and dying. I can only hope that I have such grace when it's my time.
Missing in the critique: how can an important decentralized system survive within capitalism? Most important infrastructure is bought by large market participants and exploited maximally to make money. Even the internet was turned from an aggressively non-commercial entity into one that is aggressively commercial.
TLDR: Centralization (winner takes all) is the result of preferential attachment. Some kind of downward pressure is required to counterbalance, counteract.
I dug into this topic in this talk in 2017. 'Moving Past the Scaling Myth' The core observation is that minimal spanning trees have less edge cost than fully connected graph - if you pay for the difference you can have decentralization.
Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell.
• your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal
• personal Bitcoin node (replace banking and reliance on centralized Bitcoin miners)
• ActivityPub/Mastodon (replace FB/TWTR)
If you want to message someone, you don't use WhatsApp--you talk directly to their self-hosted XMPP server. You verify your own monetary transactions on your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service. You and your friends participate in your own ActivityPub social network.
There are a lot of problems with this obviously. You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. On centralized networks, you can find someone on the other side of the world just as easily as you could find your neighbor. A decentralized world brings you back in time to where you are more limited to the people in your physical area or the online niches you run in. Do you want to sacrifice globalization to have decentralization?
Fraud is probably a harder problem than discoverability. You can always exchange (maybe through an automated pairing) IPv6 addresses if nothing else. Supporting chargebacks, eliminating spam, blocking phishing, etc. if both harder and more important to a functioning culture.
One of the best solutions for spam for a new system is to impose a proof of work requirement on sending the first message between any pair of users, or any (new username, hosting service) pairing for federated services. For any normal pairing that happens only once, but for a spammer they have to pay the cost for every message or else you can trivially block every message from that sender.
Fraud protection is harder, but it's also something that lends itself well to being an independent service. If you're buying from someone trustworthy or dealing in small value amounts then you don't need it. If you're not, you require the seller to carry insurance from someone you do trust (or don't buy from them), and then it's the insurer's problem to deal with fraud.
Spammers have large networks of computers they aren't paying for (botnets), so they aren't paying the cost of sending messages. Proof of work really doesn't solve spam anymore.
What makes it work is the asymmetry. With normal human communication you talk to the same person thousands of times, or send thousands of messages from the same account, so spending computation equivalent to something like $1 worth of Bitcoin for that is totally reasonable. Spending the equivalent of $1 worth of Bitcoin to send one spam to one person, isn't. Even if you had access to a large number of computers, you'd make much more money by using the same computational resources to mine cryptocurrency. The opportunity cost makes spamming uneconomical, and if it doesn't then you raise the cost until it is.
You can also allow users to pre-approve each other to avoid paying anything so that most legitimate communication doesn't require proof of work, which makes it a lot easier to put a high price on the remaining instances.
Agreed. More broadly, decentralization is less equipped to counteract bad actors. You really are on your own, but isn't that what you asked for when you wanted to abandon Facebook/Google/government.
A decentralized network cannot be trusted by nature. Anyone can join and lie. Successful decentralized networks need some cryptographically-secure checksum to verify its inputs: BitTorrent uses SHA-1; Bitcoin uses Merkle trees. The network participants are just dumb mirrors to provide redundancy and compute. This solves the problem of the integrity of the information, but there is no such analogue for verifying the behavior of humans using the network. For example, you can download a valid BitTorrent file that is also a trojan (virus databases are centralized), or you could send Bitcoin to a Nigerian prince (third-party escrow layers are centralized). There is no algorithm to make sure what you're doing is ethical.
Imagine running reCAPTCHA as a decentralized service that runs on random people's machines. Impossible.
There is no way to flip a switch and change everything from centralized to decentralized without making major sacrifices. No one wants to go back to the dial-up era. Much of the lauded results of the internet are actually a result of its centralization.
The dialup era makes more sense actually—services are designed more bandwidth-conscious and ad networks don’t masquerade on every website in existence.
As for streaming media, well people consume too much media to begin with so less is more.
Decentralized networks lend themselves to far better moderation than centralized. Private forums have always had better moderation than something like reddit. Well, not all, but you can ignore those ;)
> You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you.
This isn't a real trade off. Consider how the web traditionally worked. Everyone has their own website, then you have search engines like Google or Yahoo that allow you to find anything anywhere.
A third-party search engine doesn't have most of the centralization problems you get with a Facebook or a YouTube, because people only use them to the extent that they're good, which means returning the search results people want. Moreover, if YouTube goes bust, all your videos disappear with it, but if Altavista goes bust, Yahoo and Google continue to exist and index all the same information.
You can have things that index all the other things without them being a single centralized monopoly.
Maybe someone can come up with a decentralized search infrastructure. Something agent based perhaps. Otherwise the search is both centralized and in the position to make money from ads.
It's works, but it's not amazing. You basically have to use your own spam solution for it, because the bare index will be always gamed in some way - that makes it hard in practice.
The scoring algorithm is also not amazing. For example searching for ycombinator gives you http://hackr.de/tags/ycombinator and some Twitter entries as top results.
This is how things should work, but IMO it leads to unsolvable problems.
I don't think discoverability is the issue. You could easily (for hard values of easily) run a distributed and cached search system - maybe with some form of content-aware DNS-a-like metaURLs for specific information.
The underlying issues are tougher.
If you don't have perfectly robust security the system is useless, because it can be abused in almost endless ways.
If you do have perfectly robust security you have perfect cover for a criminal Dark Net.
So you need some form of identity escrow which is robust enough to allow anonymous free speech but permeable enough to allow law-enforcement to take action to prevent crimes like child porn and human trafficking.
And even then, you'll still get people gaming the system in corrupt ways - for example by setting up astroturfing businesses, paying for followers, distributing fake news, and so on.
These are political and economic problems, and I don't think they can be solved with technology.
This is one of those things that can only exist so long as it's a minority interest; whenever piracy becomes "mainstream" action will be taken against it, such as your ISP portscanning for it and banning you.
> personal Bitcoin node (replace banking
Likewise the minority safety, and has all the disadvantages of keeping cash at home as well as still needing a centralish interface to the real financial system.
Also, who's going to fight the spam? That was the crippling problem for both SMTP and USENET; SMTP built a mountain of filters for this, including centralised blacklists. USENET never quite fully solved it until it went obsolete. Anyone attempting to return to that world would do very well to look at the problems of those two and all the attempted solutions.
,,You verify your own monetary transactions on your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service''
Although that's the decentralized way to recieve Bitcoin transactions, the fact that people have a way to check centralized hubs and opt out from centralization of transaction checking easily is enough deterrent for those centralized hubs to cheat.
As an example I'm using my own Bitcoin node just for checking the relatively bigger transactions.
Broadly agree with one caveat -- the ISP. A mesh network is probably the last link in this chain needed for this to work, and even that relies on a central node: the backhaul, although (and please correct me if I'm wrong if someone more knowledgeable is reading this) I believe that the backhaul is a "dumb" pipe that is not usually censored/traffic shaped.
There are many market participants that push against decentralization at all cost (e.g. one of the reasons Google shut down Google Reader is that RSS does not fit in their business model). Decentralization is always bad news for those who like to control things, own present centralized infrastructure or use gate keeping as a measure to make money.
So just because decentralization is constantly under attack doesn't mean it's bad or even that it "doesn't work" as the author claims. If it works or not can be determined by cryptologists and mathematicians on a case by case basis and not by some "assistant professor of Media Studies" who has actually zero authority in this field.
Of course the protocols that are required to make decentralization possible need to be centralized. But that is a stupid argument. The laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe. That doesn't mean the universe is centralized.
> You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you.
Obviously you can have decentralized services that address this important 'presence' issue.
IMO the issue is that we have conflated the 'functional goal' with 'architecture'. The 'goal', for me at least, is public information systems that protect civil rights and resist the rise of tyranny. That goal, after thinking about this space for the past 25 years, can be served with a combination of centralized and decentralized services, and a mix of grassroots and corporate players.
To get there, we need (a) societal consensus that privacy in fact matters quite a lot to, and is a bedrock of, our civilization, and (b) [the recognition that] ideological bias is a deadly sin for a system architect.
I was going to say something similar, or at least related.
Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I don't think that means the decentralized architecture has failed. I think people need to distinguish decentralization as a network system state, and decentralization as an affordance. Centralized structures on a decentralized protocol can reorganize themselves, but if you build the system as centralized, it's much harder, if not impossible, barring some implicit decentralized aspect of the architecture.
The question isn't so much "do decentralized systems end up as centralized," it is "can a disrupted decentralized system reorganize itself?"
It's obviously relevant to your point in that the reason for decentralized architectures, as you say, is to maintain communication in the presence of threats, especially to free exchange of information. It's not necessarily to maintain a given network structure state.
I couldn't care less if a handful of servers become dominant on Mastodon or IPFS or whatever, if it's easy to change which handful of servers they are should they start to become compromised in some way.
"The apparently free, participatory open-source software communities have frequently depended on the charismatic and arbitrary authority of a “benevolent dictator for life,” from Linus Torvalds of Linux (who is not always so benevolent) to Guido van Rossum of Python"
GRAB. FORK. It's all there. Nothing stops you. Sleepless nights, stay on your toes.
Nothing stops people from complaining either. And if you fork, people who didn't will begin complaining about you.
Are you arguing about the centralized role Linus or Guido have? I think what you point out, the lack of a formal requirement for centralization just makes the point that centralization emerges from these networks anyways a bit stronger. And hence the point that we need to build accountability (git annotate for source) into the new systems is strengthened.
It seems to be workin' well enough for the folks over at mastodon.social, JS.
I've never really been a huge fan of twitter, and I got rid of failbook years ago, but masto fills the void without all the pain of the aforementioned other 'platforms'.
Torrent links are centralized in trackers and you'd see a single tracker site dominate if the legal atmosphere allowed for it.
And honestly, it doesn't work as well. If you don't care about decentralization for decentralization sake its not ideal. Streaming websites don't use it. Netflix doesn't torrent a video to you.
It seems we're getting bogged down by conflating decentralization with democratization. Email is certainly decentralized but its not something every layperson can run and maintain.
Even true democratization generally still only serves to multiply starting advantages unfortunately.
Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality.
This is why redistributive policies are always going to be required. Democratizing the means of production, or even capital ownership itself, is never enough.
> Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality.
I'm not quite sure I get your example: so if you give it to the former you're more likely to produce closer to the extremely rich man with the socially corrosive advertising platform that has clear, real, marked destructive effects on entire country's political structures, the one that vapourised entire media businesses due to misinterpreted analytics, etc etc. The net negative effect of the hypothetical latter seems vastly less?
One thing I don't see argued very much is that lowering barriers to entry and providing more frictionless access usually inevitably leads to more consolidation, not less. When there is very open access (e.g. "Anyone with a computer can spin up a website!") it means that users will choose services that even have small improvements or advantages, until those services build up so much market share that they inevitably have huge moats to competition. I've heard lots of comments along the lines of "I wish Amazon had more competition!", but then those same folks will choose a service if it's 10c cheaper or if a product can arrive an hour faster.
On the contrary, if you look at businesses where there is not huge consolidation, it is often because there is "market unfriendly" regulation. E.g. there are many rich car dealers spread throughout the US because they've put in place so many anti-competitive regulations. While I'd love it if Tesla could sell direct everywhere, it also means a lot of this wealth that currently stays relatively local would get sucked up by a Silicon Valley corporation. Same thing goes for Realtors and the real estate business.
As a consumer I love more open markets, but I don't think we've fully addressed the consequences of how this leads to greater inequality and consolidation of services.
Enlightenment comes when you realize that being a consumer is not a 24/7 occupation.
The same people who consume also need to be either small business owners, freelancers, or employees. In fact without the money from that, they couldn't be consumers in the first place.
So what's bad for a consumer role can balance out or be very good if it helps keep more people making money as opposed to the "efficient single corporation with the minimal workforce" selling everything". Such corporations are how many small towns in America turned into wastelands...
You need middlemen, even if it's not the most efficient productivity wise, because it helps make more money go around, stay local, and keep communities livable.
The alternative is a future with a 20% working, a 0.01% corporate overlords with the top end having Bezos style riches, and 80% barely making ends meet, living in slums, and we're getting there...
Nearly every law in the US is a weaponized corporate action to prevent competition and secure market hold. That already happened. That is the root cause of the wealth disparity. You argue for more of the same. The government will not be able to fix problems it created. It will only make them worse.
This Friedman-like thinking and cute propaganda sound bytes just doesn't work tho
Chile during the Pinochet Regime is an excellent example of the Neoliberal system not delivering on the promises, as hn_throwaway_99 mentioned, economies of scale simply take over any benefit of low gov friction "free markets", and any small advantage over time becomes an overwhelming one. At which point it simply becomes a mathematical snowball effect, reducing or removing government barriers of entry won't make your particular gadget or doodad be able to compete in quality nor cost against one produced by a huge mega-conglomerate, if anything that mega-conglomerate will see if it can steal your idea or buy the patent (gov!) so it can improve its own. It is the same thing that happens in South Korea with the Chaebols
Anyhow, point being, the Kansas Experiment failed[1], Chilean Chicago Boys Experiment failed to deliver after ~17 years of authoritarian rule(When Pinochet left power country had a ~40% poverty rate)[2]
This leads to the simple idea that the less friction your system has to accrue wealth the higher wealth inequality will be, and then the goal should be to make it as easy as possible for everybody to make their own start ups, but to create as much friction as possible for said startups to gain too much economy of scale momentum. Where the threshold of where that line would be, be left to policy makers, and ideally something politically independent, akin to the central bank
In a just society the only possible way to get rich is through helping people. We want rich people. The more rich people the better off everyone is. Capitalism is beautiful. If a company is able to sustain market share through healthy competition then wonderful, that is great. Every law in the US right now is to ensure those corporations don't lose market share, edging everyone else out. It is basic economics. It is the government intervention that insures competition is reduced every single time, literally, not figuratively.
The issue with the current set of laws regulating corporations is that those laws were made with intervention from lobbyist groups, which changed legislation to benefit those lobbying groups. In reality, the way to do this fairly is to repeal these laws, remove power from corporations giving it back to the state (possibly through actually taxing corporations and the rich properly, along the lines of what Huey Long proposed a long time ago) and removing the capacity for corporations to lobby at all. The problem is not regulation, it is that corporations have the power to change that regulation. An unregulated market would be just as unfair as regulation enforced monopolies and monosonies.
If such changes were brought about, the increased taxes could go towards things like infrastructure and social welfare, which would actually help people, unlike what billionaires pretend is fair compensation to their harms upon society, when in reality they give back very little. Bezos and Musk for example, both got into the space industry instead of putting a lot of their wealth back into philanthropy. The seeming odd one out is those who are like Bill Gates, who do actually give back a massive portion of their wealth.
The regulation is what allows the problems by design. Take Wall Street, most the big names would have been shut down and liquidated to cover crime restitution... if it weren't for regulation. The EPA regulations shield companies from liability if they have an accident but were following the regulations they lobbied for. I worked for a megacorp that passed safety laws to hurt competitors. The airport TSA regs are specifically for shielding the airlines from liability in the case of a security incident. All regulations are a fraud. Every problem they purport to solve would already be covered by existing law, serious law. Either you are liable for damages or you are not. With any regulations the big players never are. Pollution is already covered through property and violence laws (poisoning my air is a violent act). Removing the regulations is what would remove power from the corporations. If it is already covered under existing law then the regs are to bypass them.
Can't tell if sarcasm or not, but the US doesn't have some "unthinkably high standard of living".
It's actually below most western European countries in most global metrics, including such basics as infant mortality. It trumps most in gun deaths and incarceration rates though, so there's that...
The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists - American or not. It's salient not because it disproves your judgment (and that of many others) that the US is a dysfunctional hellhole, but because it is what people are compelled to rationalize away and obviously don't succeed on their own terms.
EU includes some poor countries that were recently under Soviet occupation.
And before that WW2 levelled entire cities, like capital of Poland was obliterated as it was bombed once when Germans took it, once when the Polish rose up, then again as Soviets took it.
At the dawn of computer era there was a wall, landmines and machine gun nests going though the centre of Berlin.
Isolate your comparison to northern Europe, spared by war and Soviets, and the difference in GDP is no longer in US favour.
2) Just look at the chart I linked to - on decadal timescales, the EU was catching up to the US rapidly and then plateaued, in more than one cycle. No idea why, but something significant was happening and then stalling. Obviously history wasn't retroactively occurring and being eradicated.
2) It's good data, the graph shows 2008 as an inflection point. I think that's the disastrous austerity programme chosen by political leadership throughout europe. Instead of investing they decided to cut spending in a recession. That's my take anyway.
1) You can't brush off foreign occupation 29 years ago as cherry picking. This dataset starts in 1960s, when all of Eastern Europe were soviet puppets. There is nothing comparable in recent US history.
"There is nothing comparable in recent US history."
Of course there is. What transition happened in the US in the 60s, that the country is still not completely out of? You'd know instantly if an American was using it as an excuse (as is quite common) for not matching various European metrics.
>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists
For one, the EU has dozens of ex Eastern Bloc communist countries (including areas of ex-USSR) which still play catch up and wages are still much lower.
Second, money is not everything. If the state, every day life, cost of living, etc is set up in a good way, you can get 2x or more the quality of life for half the money.
>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K
This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US which is what your average citizen truly cares about
Post-Hard Brexit it will probably change, EU PPP has already been damaged by the current Brexit scandals, and the last few years of increased US Dollar interest rate has increased relative US PPP, but because of income inequality those financial changes aren't really transferred to the everyday US citizen
Also, the difference in raw incomes is mostly based of the so called "Exorbitant Privilege" the US has for having its currency be the default world reserve currency, it is quite easy to understand when one comprehends that the US central bank basically "prints gold", and that like ~60% of all international transactions are done abroad but with the US dollar as transaction medium
"This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US"
I find it rather unbelievable that things are cheaper in Europe. A few years back, I used to work for a multinational, which opened an office there, and some people I knew went and at least one or two stayed, which lead me to idly consider the idea of being an expat, and my cursory research indicated salaries are lower and the cost of living is higher.
I mean, from my perspective, just the fact that you had the chance to work abroad for a multinational would put you way ahead of the wage the median US citizen has to survive on, so your experience is not representative of the median, let alone PPP stats
I'm certain we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about the West's distance from the depravation of the state of nature (capitalism certainly causes), and you're talking about some cherry picked metrics that make some countries in the West look better than others.
It's not the government that created the problem, it's the big corporations, getting too powerful, and buying laws to stifle competition and enjoy market hold.
What I proposed is the opposite: laws working against those mega-corporations in favor of many smaller corporations.
Only the people, through law, have the power to do that. The big corporate overlords, left to their own devices, wont be able to fix the problems they created. They will only make them worse.
I think you're missing my point. I hate dealing with car dealers, and I would much prefer a direct-from-the-manufacturer car buying experience. But that inevitably leads to a much greater consolidation and concentration of wealth, where consumer dollars get drained from most locales and end up in far fewer locales.
My point is that it's trivially easy to understand the negatives of things like car dealers and real estate agents (pretty much everyone I know hates dealing with them), but I think we're just starting to come to terms with the potential negatives of having huge, geographically broad, open markets where there are very few winners.
It’s common knowledge that open markets often lead to concentration and eventually to monopolies. That’s why anti trust regulations are in place.
Would be interesting to understand how this combines with the going on decentralization tendency.
Yes, this. It's a realisation I've had in the past few years and am starting to discuss myself.
It's a key reason why technological improvements tend to increase rather than decrease inequality. Technology, generally, appears to serve wealth and power.
I'm not fully convinced this is a universal rule, though it seems at the very least a strong bias. It seems to fall from the observation that "all machines are amplifiers", which means that all machines are force multipliers.
It may be that there are technologies which are dissipators and can be used to deflect or divert attacks, though these still seem to favour the more heavily-capitalised party. Shields rather than swords or range weapons, or perhaps distracting / obscuring capabilities.
What makes for decentralised systems is increased frictions, whether physical, political, cultural, or social.
Where transport is expensive, materials are locally sourced, talent participates locally, government and business operate locally.
It was the factory system, mass production, transport, and advertising which allowed one factory or manufacturer to serve the whole world. Mind: specialisation means that there are probably many individual niches which can be filled, though horizontal and veritical integration may carve into this as well.
Democracy is decentralisation. It doesn't 'work'. It's what Churchill called 'the worst form of government'. Except for all the others. Its most egregious failure is that it often fails to undermine things that can and do subvert it. Decentralisation is like a Yin-Yang kind of thing, constantly challenged by its nemesis 'the forces of centralisation'. Ultimately decentralisation, just like democracy, is more resilient over time. At any one time, centralised systems can potentially bring more resources to bear upon a problem more quickly. But because decentralised systems can be designed to 'temporarily centralise' this 'emergency response capability shortfall of decentralised systems' is just a design problem. It turns out that it is also probably the most serious challenge to decentralisation. But because resilience, in the light of the challenges we currently face, is something we are all committing ourselves to tackling, expect 'designing decentralised systems' to stay at the top of the process design agenda for the forseeable future, notwithstanding any yet-to-be-experienced shortcomings and failings of decentralised systems that appear on the horizon.
Democracy is just decentralized decision making. And even that decision making is incredibly low level, and information of what people want gets mostly lost in the process.
You have very heavily centralized bureaucratic state makes all the choice and the majority of people making those choices are not elected.
Democracy has some decentralized elements, but its far, far, far away from what we would consider a decentralized system of government.
In an old 10th town in the middle east you might have 4 different legal systems for different communities, and then special extra layer of law and common practice for issues between these community (different for each set). Plus different higher imperial laws and so on. Each of these system had a variety of different systems of enforcement and financing. Non-centralized provision of every-thing we now call a public-service.
Democracies can and will bring 'more resources' to a war when the population is mostly behind it.
The author seems to be too focused on cryptocurrency and perhaps unaware of a lot of successfully decentralized protocols such as DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN and IPFS.
Cryptocurrencies are interesting (in the context of this essay/discussion) because they're a well-known instance of a technology aimed at decentralisation, for a specific reason (to eliminate reliance on trust in the monetary system), which has to some extent succeeded, and in numerous others, failed.
The points made generally (not limited to cryptocurrencies) are very well made. They parallel thinking I and others have been arriving at independently in recent years, after long swallowing the decentralised, crowdsourced, open source, distributed, mantra.
I won't say that that's failed entirely. But it's definitely failed to deliver what it promised.
DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN, and IPFS have negligible take-up so far as I'm aware, and I keep reasonable tabs on the space.
>Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized and decentralized power.
A previous HN post said it best: what decentralists want is to reclaim power from larger organizations—power over their data and identity, power to switch to a competitor's client or build their own, etc. It's similar to the right-to-repair movement that way.
The problem is that governments, corporations—groups really—can always be more powerful than an individual. That makes it advantageous to join one against your fellow individual. Plus once you pay your initiation fee to the group (usually giving up some autonomy), the marginal cost to you for additional members is often very low, or may even be outweighed by the marginal benefits, so you'll stay and the group aggregates members.
Perhaps a field of individuals constantly vigilant could band together to sunder any proto-group before it gains traction (and then they'd have to disband themselves before becoming the target). Though I imagine that would be a constant arms race to detect group formation, and we've all see how apathetic people are toward even flagrant digital malpractice.
Or maybe the government decrees that no company can have more than 10% market share. Bring on the conglomerates and umbrella corps.
Perhaps resources can't be efficiently decentralized, only stateless protocols. Is that alone worth the effort? There would still be vendor lock-in.
All I know is I want to wrest more power from corporations than I currently have over my digital experience without losing access to the resources they cloister.
I've been reading Robert Anton Wilson this morning, so I'm all hopped up on conspiracy theory (what do you call it when the conspiracies are real?)
Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of society.
You want decentralization because you want power.
Let me tell you a story about power and decentralization:
Many years ago a friend of mine an I were rambling in the Mission district (of SF) late at night. He said, "Hey, check this out." and made a kind of bird call. It was answered from several places within a few blocks around us, and we could hear other echoes further out as the call propagated. "Those are the people in the gangs."
Most of us just aren't that motivated.
"the history of the world is the history of warfare between secret societies" ~Ishmael Reed
One aspect is the existential angst of the species, i.e. "Which is worse? That the world is ruled by the Iluminati. or that it isn't?" Is there a God or do we really have to do the job ourselves? Are we the victims of chance in an uncaring universe, and the sweep of progress merely an illusion? Or are we in fact the self-creating Telos of a sentient Universe?
Does Humanity have a Soul? If not, can we Create one?
- - - -
Even if we suppose that "the system" is ruled by an elite (which is arguably true†) can we suppose that the elite is unified and harmonious in their intent? Or are we caught up in "warfare between secret societies" after all? Certainly the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 can't be part of any sane plan, can it?
- - - -
In one of the Subgenius books there's a story about how humanity is actually a biological weapon of the anaerobic microbes used in their ancient war with the oxygen-breathers, and the current climate crisis is their gambit, we're doing our jobs.
- - - -
All I'm really saying is that both "system" and "intent" are open-ended terms...
But yeah, the Internet et. al. are basically working in the way that the elite want them to to keep control of the masses, however imperfectly. Watch Hong Kong and you can see "the system" adapt in near-real-time. The next episode is happening right now.
† "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens"
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
We already have a decentralized/federated social network with millions (probably billions) of users. It's called email, and it works pretty well--though not perfect, email illustrates that there's nothing intrinsically impossible about such systems.
Messaging is an important part and most social networks contain messaging. But messaging on its own is not a social network. (no contact discovery, subscription to events, persistent connection with other users)
My fantasy solution to all this is to separate PII from functionality.
You would have profile providers and interaction providers, and any of us would subscribe ourselves into the services we want to use, disconnecting whenever we didn't want to use e.g. Twitter or wanted to take a break. Within these joins, a person could control which of their PII they want to allow the service to have access to. You could run your own PII provider or join/pay for someone else to run it.
I have read "everything for everyone" and agree on some of the major points it and this article raises. I do think that there might be a bit of context missing from this thread and the article in general.
I think someone pointed out that "decentralization" is different from "democratization" and I would wholeheartedly agree. I think of both as independent variables which can be tuned in the construction of any organizational structure. Also to me the idea that democracy, as it pertains to business structures, should also be something that is tunable.
Projects like DAO's are great examples if highly distributed yet fairly undemocratic structures. As the core team creating them (and often monetizing them) do not nessecarily share power in the direction of the project. I am not advocating for or against that but just pointing it out.
But as history has shown there are real tradeoffs when you try and reach scale (in whatever metric) when you centralize democracy. It's my view that there is a sweet spot (and serious upside) for introducing decentralization and democratization into most projects, but it all depends on the use case. As a few examples take a look at the success of projects like stocksy.com (royalty based stock images company owned by the contributors), smart.coop (freelancers cooperative that handles contracts and billing). And of course Mondragon (https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/) which takes democracy in the workplace to an industrial scale.
At my current company (https://www.staffing.coop and https://www.tribeworks.io) we decided to form as a cooperative (instead of using a DAO) because it better fit our current needs. But we don't see this as a static choice.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadI'm all for real standards, and believe W3C has acted in good faith, but in what shape is W3C's standardization process now (hint: they cancelled the HTML 5.3 and SVG 2 spec) and where has it lead us?
But it turns out that's probably the wrong shape. While some stuff at IETF would get done by "any Google employee" or "any Microsoft employee" or "any Cisco employee" plenty of stuff that actually gets done is because one or more specific people cared about it, regardless of their employer or occasionally even if they don't have one.
For years it was literally impossible to work on W3C standards as an individual. They eventually fixed that, but the message sent echoes forever, "Go away, we don't care".
I like Tim (he is a nerd, he used to derail our apparently serious board-level meetings with his IT problems), but my impression is that one of the things that lead to the W3C was that Tim could see from pretty early on (certainly by the time W3C is founded) that there's a lot of cash sloshing about for his Web, and of course it's the nature of the beast that Tim doesn't automatically get a slice. That's part of the reason other systems didn't get traction - nobody wants to pay a toll. The W3C is a way for Tim to get some of that money for his pet projects.
I'm not sure there's anything the W3C alone could have done to prevent that, even if they hadn't made any of the mistakes they have made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Public...
But the web isn't just a browser vendor's gamble; it's used for vital communication and documentation in business, education, administration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. If we want to depend on the web (and spend billions on it), then there ought to be some representation and participation, since there clearly is public interest, and possibly funding. Maybe people looked at W3C to organize these interests, but indeed W3C has failed this expectation by statue.
What they're doing instead is publishing redacted WHATWG snapshots (and have announced to not even do any redaction in the future). In other words, they're publishing work-in-progress collaborative documents without significant contributions and editorial. Having a point of reference is still something I guess (I'm even basing my HTML 5.x SGML DTDs on W3C's snapshots [1]) but not advancing the interest of web users, which W3C should have made their goal.
[1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html
Also, it feels like you're confusing the end user with the developers. Business, education, admininstration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. are all fields that rely on the web _through_ browsers and browser components, made by browser vendors. Whether that's IE6, or WebKit, or Electron, or Android Webview. So yes: the browser vendors are absolutely the people primarily pulling the strings, and pushing the envelope, which makes a whole lot of sense: it's their collective product they're curating.
However, there is another model for web apps, not purely decentralised, but a practical option where traffic is not funnelled through a small number of big players. Let's call it the WordPress model.
Consider the following: WordPress is an example of a profitable open source app that can easily be installed on countless shared hosting platforms or on a VPS. It's easy to switch hosting providers when you want to (rather than be locked into one provider). You can take your data with you when you switch. The popularity of WordPress means that one-click installs are widespread. Many providers also offer a 'managed' service where they take care of back-up and updates. But crucially you're still not tied to a single provider.
Now imagine if all web apps were as easy to install on the server via a one-click installation like WordPress. Unfortunately, there is no common standard or API for software installation on the server side, and this lack of an easy installation process for everyone severely limits self-hosting websites and apps.
Many developers think deploying a server-side web app is a non-issue, or they erroneously think that installing Cloudron/providing Docker instances/typing command line instructions are all "easy". Have you seen the server deployment instructions for "web friendly" languages like Ruby and Python? They're ludicrously complicated. Developers are completely blind to the complexity and see nothing wrong in such installation procedures.
The result is ever-growing centralised software through the SaaS model which beats the self-hosting alternative in simplicity every single time. Imagine if your local desktop apps were completely controlled, tracked and even terminated remotely by one provider - don't like the though of that? Yet, that is exactly what the centralised Saas model enables and nobody blinks an eye.
I wish there was some momentum or traction in making server-side web app installation as universally simple as a one-click WordPress install for all for all web apps. It would unlock countless opportunities for developers to reach more users or customers. I'm not one for conspiracies, but I wonder sometimes if developers actually prefer the complexity of server-side installation because it makes selling a SaaS solution much more attractive over the ludicrously complicated self-hosting option.
To say that decentralization will never happen is nuts.
I do however find them doable and maybe also a kind of job security for that reason. But I don't prefer them. I want to build stuff, not do a bunch of prep work every time I want to build stuff.
Sure, you can install a gazillion packages, use serverless, static site generators, SaaS platforms, install CMS x, y or z.
But then again, you can still use a simple FTP program, copy HTML files over TCP/IP to a remote server with a process running in the background that listens for incoming HTTP requests. Your browser will still be able to from the HTML it receives via a HTTP response. In fact, you don't need a browser. Curl or Telnet will yield a string of text characters any human can read.
Those basic protocols still exist after 30 years and underpin the Web. Nothing changed fundamentally, when you dig deep.
As such, you could lease a shared hosting somewhere and put up your own set of HTML pages and slap a DNS domain to the IP of the server. Boom. Congratulations. You own a website now.
Decentralisation - at it's core - is about ownership. If you put content and data on a host, who owns that? You or the owner of the host? This is where the entire discussion becomes a legal debate.
The big shift of the past decade is that social media offer easy access to centralised hosts they own. This has caused a massive influx of users to publish stuff on hosts that are owned by others.
Meanwhile, there's this perception that you need a gazillion tools to build a website. That you need deep knowledge of languages and such to publish HTML formatted content on a host you own.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Unless you are a business, or an organisation and you need to manage tons HTML formatted content, you can do away with a text editor, basic HTML and shared hosting you pay a tuppence for.
The only reason why things got complex because of business reasons.
Your analysis that "ownership of data" being the core tenet of decentralization is incorrect. Consider the 3 major examples of centralization complaints:
- Youtube is too centralized. A decentralized alternative is PeerTube. Is this about ownership? No because Youtube's TOS specifically says the uploader to Youtube retains ownership of the content.[1]
- Twitter is too centralized. A decentralized alternative is Mastodon. But it's not about ownership of data. The Twitter TOS says the user retains copyright ownership of the tweets.[2]
- Facebook is too centralized. But again, the various decentralized alternatives do not change the terms of content ownership. Facebook TOS says the user keeps ownership.[3]
What the 3 examples show is that data ownership isn't the issue. The real issues of centralized services are power and audience reach.
If a musician writes an original song and films an music video, and then uploads it to Youtube, the musician retains the data ownership and the intellectual copyrights. Because intellectual property ownership wasn't transferred, Youtube can be seen as a glorified content-delivery-network cache. (And there's the rub... that so-called "cdn" of Youtube has attracted a billion eyeballs.) That means there are different issues that motivates decentralisation; e.g. the power to filter/rank/recommend/censor/demonetize videos. The concentration of massive audience reach in Youtube's centralized service that makes the musician's decision to host his music video on his own home server irrelevant.
I think those 3 examples should trigger a rethink of your mental framework that led you to conclude data ownership is the main issue.
[1] excerpt from https://www.youtube.com/t/terms : 6.C - For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, [...]
[2] excerpt from https://twitter.com/en/tos : You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content). By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, [...]
[3] excerpt from https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms : "You own the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and the other Facebook Company Products you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want. However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a ‘license’) to use this content. This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above. Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, [...]
Each of those TOS agreements has the same canned phrase:
[...] you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free [...]
This is a weasel clause. "Yeah, you retain ownership, but you must also give us a license. But you still own it!"
Rightttttttttttt.
Not true, and there is many technologies, both new and established, which are fundamentally decentralized. Bittorrent is the first example that springs to mind. Cryptocurrencies are another example, etc.
But the actual thesis of the author is that you can't decentralize "everything" (the HN title has the straw man though). Even in successful decentralized networks, some aspects (usually governance) stay or become centralized. The author easily succeeds in making that point because everyone already agrees with it.
Whether that's a problem worth discarding the whole movement towards decentralization is mostly a matter of preconceived opinions.
Imagine if someone said, "competitive markets aren't always possible, and over-saturated markets are usually bad for consumers anyway. Therefore, people who advocate for more competition with ISPs or who try to block mergers are just being unrealistic. A competitive market just isn't possible at scale."
Yet plenty of people will argue that Git's goals around decentralization ultimately failed just because Github is convenient and widely used. Or that because social media platforms often naturally trend towards centralization, that efforts like Mastadon are bad for consumers and are a waste of time.
That many real-world decentralized systems have some centralized parts shouldn't be seen as unusual, and it isn't some kind of killing blow to people who advocate for more decentralization. This is the world working as expected.
If the only two states of government possible were anarchy and totalitarianism, then totalitarianism might be the better choice. But those aren't the only two governments possible. Similarly, decentralization is not a binary state. You can use centralization and decentralization in tandem to cover for the flaws and gaps of functionality that both strategies have.
The Internet is decentralized to the extent there's no single "Internet company" which can kick you off.
Various companies try very hard to make you forget these things.
The very fact you think it is impossible to reach end users without using Google should highlight just how much they have cornered the market.
Remember, internet search was not always a given, and the worked just fine.
The issues involved with everyone pulling from everyone, dealing with merge conflicts, etc in a distributed way with no agreed upon, central, source of truth seems fairly implausible for any reasonably sized team but I'd love to know if there are gitflow style workflows for this that make it easier than it first appears.
Even in centralized workflows, the decentralized core of Git makes things better.
You've never had a central repository go down and then pulled from the person sitting next to you? At the last organization I worked with, this happened multiple times. And when Microsoft bought Github and a bunch of people panicked, a lot of them were able to move to Gitlab (even without deleting their Github repos) specifically because the technology behind Git allowed you to add multiple remotes.
The article makes the point:
> No system is simply decentralized, full-stop. We shouldn’t expect any to be.
Git is the same way. Even with Linux, where patches are sent around using Email and there is no central repository that has every in-progress effort, there's still ultimately one person signing off on the final release. But that doesn't mean that there aren't decentralized parts of Git that are very, very useful, specifically because they are decentralized or because they allow you to fall back to decentralized workflows when necessary.
One of the things this article is getting at is that people treat decentralized as a binary state -- you either have one source of truth that coordinates everything, or you have complete chaos. Most decentralized systems are in the middle; they allow centralization, but also support fallbacks for when that centralization fails.
Git's branch strategy is another good example of this. Most Git systems use a master branch. But the value of branching is that you can have diverging code states that aren't yet centralized into a single location. You can fork off of master and have a completely parallel codebase, if for some reason you need to. You can have your release in a decentralized state for a week, where multiple people are working on separate branches and there is no single branch that has everyone's changes, and then you can re-centralize everything to master or a staging once you feel comfortable with the features you want.
There is in theory nothing that prevents an issue tracker to be decentralized in the same way git is, but so far that hasn't materialized. You can export issues from github as .json, which allows you to transfer some things over, but users only have a username in those bug reports, not an email, which makes it impossible to contact them after a move to gitlab.
When one of the largest torrent sites go down, the torrents do not go down with them. You can still seed them and indeed many people continue doing that. Others can still download them provided they have the torrent file or the magnet links. These sites are usually archived, you can still have access to such magnet links. Plus, there are many torrent search engines, and so forth. You can use as many trackers as you want, or none! These torrent sites are really just aggregators for better discoverability. Plus there are trackerless torrents nowadays that use DHT in which every peer acts as a tracker. This is called decentralized tracking, a trackerless system. I do not think that comparing this to git or GitHub makes any sense.
Decentralization works in cases that are like we were back to the near empty savannah and where everybody could just go in his own direction. The Internet was once like that - but it is not any more, it is rather the reverse.
By the way, just a few hours ago I submitted to HN this article: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html - it is about these tensions between our freedom to do whatever we like and the need for coordination in a more and more connected world.
Obviously, the Pareto Principle is usually at work, even if protocols are decentralized by design. Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice.
Even if one were to capture political control and attempt to redesign governance to be decentralized, there would still be a type of natural selection process for systems which seek to reproduce and expand, by all possible means including violence.
And decentralization and non-violence are also different, as well. Decentralized collective violence is common.
Why do you say that? I see email as an example of very successful decentralisation. GMail etc. have a large share of the market but they don't dominate it, and the different providers interoperate very well.
Google controls the most, yes, but they aren't the only ones to consider. The number of competitors who are significant players are only a handful. The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email.
Email being an open protocol allows interoperability and lowers barriers to entry, and all of that is good, but power is still concentrated into the hands of a few players nonetheless.
We’ve experienced some fake outs with applications like Twitter and Slack which first appeared they were going to allow other clients, and then closed off their systems when reaching a point they didn’t think they needed them anymore.
Certainly it is more centralised than say the automotive industry. But it seems much more similar to that than operating systems, browsers, social networks etc..
> Certainly it is more centralised than say the automotive industry. But it seems much more similar to that than operating systems, browsers, social networks etc..
But those addresses from university or work are increasingly just gsuite deployments.
However, I think the tide is turning with universities. Enterprise will be longer I think largely because of Excel (so might as well have O365, might as well add Outlook, etc).
>Email being an open protocol allows interoperability and lowers barriers to entry, and all of that is good, but power is still concentrated into the hands of a few players nonetheless.
Power? In email? How exactly is that power exercised? What effect does 5 providers accounting for a majority of email have?
As far as I can tell, it has only caused too much HTML email.
it was decentralizing in the sense that secession was meant to grant political authority to local elites. 'devolution' just sounds like a moral judgment, which while fair is not very useful for these purposes.
as an aside, it's interesting to note that a similar thing happens with the word "degenerate". usually it means inferior, primitive, etc., but in mathematics it has no such connotation (eg, a degenerate triangle where the vertices are collinear).
I'm distinguishing that from the general term of decentralization, because from an individualist viewpoint, devolution can result in a consolidation of power. If an autocratic regime secedes from a large democratic republic, for instance.
EDIT: I see you've already retracted the comment. Nevermind :)
My first job was at what was essentially a huge coop: the 100% employee owned defense contractor SAIC. SAIC spoiled me for all other jobs I had because there was a good vibe and efficiency that came with all employees having a strong motivation for the long term success of the company. After I left SAIC, it eventually became a public company and changed its name to Leidos.
Also, nice tidbit about SAIC. It seems that many coops get coopted. Suggesting there's some as yet unknown magic sauce that makes some coops more durable.
I'm very interested in comparative governance models. All tips, links welcome.
I just want someone to point at some real world working organizations.
Kinda like how QA obsessives study the Toyota Production System.
--
I joined a FOSS project structured as multi-org consortium (Kuali) explicitly to learn how they work. (It didn't.)
Richard Wolff's book Democracy at Work advocates WDSE (IIRC, worker directed social enterprises). But, sadly, while Wolff's works are descriptive, he hasn't (yet?) gotten into case studies and prescriptive works.
In the USA, the SEIU and other unions are funding misc coops. IIRC, coops currently employ 1.4m workers. I haven't had the gumption to contact the principals to see how they're doing.
He wrote quite a lot on organising people, particularly software development, but instead of focusing on how to make people efficient, he focused on how to organise the group to protect from opportunistic outsiders / psychopaths coming in and taking personal advantage and destroying the group in the process.
After having his early work ruined several times by other people taking unearned credit, taking money out, causing projects to fail, ZeroMQ was organised around his ideas.
“Coops that get coopted” or are less durable, might be failing to protect their structure well enough.
just make sure that anyone who wants can join (by complying), otherwise if people are left out by definition from joining (can't change property X) you're just recreating "national socialism"
Ecology and population biology are fascinating sources of ideas in this regard.
I read Social Architecture (after my Kuali experience). It's very good. In my head, it sits alongside Clay Shirky (eg Here Comes Everyone).
Whenever questions like "how do I make money working on open source?" and "which license should I use?" comes up, I expect Hintjens' wisdom to be at the top.
Alas. I'd cite Hintjens myself, but I have yet to put his wisdom to practice, so I'd be just another poseur.
I also read his writings about health and dying. I can only hope that I have such grace when it's my time.
His others are in my queue.
Centralization is a cost reduction maneuver.
https://youtu.be/MgbmGQVa4wc?t=700
• your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal
• email server (replace Gmail)
• torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.)
• personal Bitcoin node (replace banking and reliance on centralized Bitcoin miners)
• ActivityPub/Mastodon (replace FB/TWTR)
If you want to message someone, you don't use WhatsApp--you talk directly to their self-hosted XMPP server. You verify your own monetary transactions on your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service. You and your friends participate in your own ActivityPub social network.
There are a lot of problems with this obviously. You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. On centralized networks, you can find someone on the other side of the world just as easily as you could find your neighbor. A decentralized world brings you back in time to where you are more limited to the people in your physical area or the online niches you run in. Do you want to sacrifice globalization to have decentralization?
One of the best solutions for spam for a new system is to impose a proof of work requirement on sending the first message between any pair of users, or any (new username, hosting service) pairing for federated services. For any normal pairing that happens only once, but for a spammer they have to pay the cost for every message or else you can trivially block every message from that sender.
Fraud protection is harder, but it's also something that lends itself well to being an independent service. If you're buying from someone trustworthy or dealing in small value amounts then you don't need it. If you're not, you require the seller to carry insurance from someone you do trust (or don't buy from them), and then it's the insurer's problem to deal with fraud.
You can also allow users to pre-approve each other to avoid paying anything so that most legitimate communication doesn't require proof of work, which makes it a lot easier to put a high price on the remaining instances.
A decentralized network cannot be trusted by nature. Anyone can join and lie. Successful decentralized networks need some cryptographically-secure checksum to verify its inputs: BitTorrent uses SHA-1; Bitcoin uses Merkle trees. The network participants are just dumb mirrors to provide redundancy and compute. This solves the problem of the integrity of the information, but there is no such analogue for verifying the behavior of humans using the network. For example, you can download a valid BitTorrent file that is also a trojan (virus databases are centralized), or you could send Bitcoin to a Nigerian prince (third-party escrow layers are centralized). There is no algorithm to make sure what you're doing is ethical.
Imagine running reCAPTCHA as a decentralized service that runs on random people's machines. Impossible.
There is no way to flip a switch and change everything from centralized to decentralized without making major sacrifices. No one wants to go back to the dial-up era. Much of the lauded results of the internet are actually a result of its centralization.
As for streaming media, well people consume too much media to begin with so less is more.
Edit: https://www.quora.com/Does-bittorrent-support-SHA-2-256-512-...
This isn't a real trade off. Consider how the web traditionally worked. Everyone has their own website, then you have search engines like Google or Yahoo that allow you to find anything anywhere.
A third-party search engine doesn't have most of the centralization problems you get with a Facebook or a YouTube, because people only use them to the extent that they're good, which means returning the search results people want. Moreover, if YouTube goes bust, all your videos disappear with it, but if Altavista goes bust, Yahoo and Google continue to exist and index all the same information.
You can have things that index all the other things without them being a single centralized monopoly.
The scoring algorithm is also not amazing. For example searching for ycombinator gives you http://hackr.de/tags/ycombinator and some Twitter entries as top results.
I don't think discoverability is the issue. You could easily (for hard values of easily) run a distributed and cached search system - maybe with some form of content-aware DNS-a-like metaURLs for specific information.
The underlying issues are tougher.
If you don't have perfectly robust security the system is useless, because it can be abused in almost endless ways.
If you do have perfectly robust security you have perfect cover for a criminal Dark Net.
So you need some form of identity escrow which is robust enough to allow anonymous free speech but permeable enough to allow law-enforcement to take action to prevent crimes like child porn and human trafficking.
And even then, you'll still get people gaming the system in corrupt ways - for example by setting up astroturfing businesses, paying for followers, distributing fake news, and so on.
These are political and economic problems, and I don't think they can be solved with technology.
This is one of those things that can only exist so long as it's a minority interest; whenever piracy becomes "mainstream" action will be taken against it, such as your ISP portscanning for it and banning you.
> personal Bitcoin node (replace banking
Likewise the minority safety, and has all the disadvantages of keeping cash at home as well as still needing a centralish interface to the real financial system.
Also, who's going to fight the spam? That was the crippling problem for both SMTP and USENET; SMTP built a mountain of filters for this, including centralised blacklists. USENET never quite fully solved it until it went obsolete. Anyone attempting to return to that world would do very well to look at the problems of those two and all the attempted solutions.
Although that's the decentralized way to recieve Bitcoin transactions, the fact that people have a way to check centralized hubs and opt out from centralization of transaction checking easily is enough deterrent for those centralized hubs to cheat.
As an example I'm using my own Bitcoin node just for checking the relatively bigger transactions.
So just because decentralization is constantly under attack doesn't mean it's bad or even that it "doesn't work" as the author claims. If it works or not can be determined by cryptologists and mathematicians on a case by case basis and not by some "assistant professor of Media Studies" who has actually zero authority in this field.
Of course the protocols that are required to make decentralization possible need to be centralized. But that is a stupid argument. The laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe. That doesn't mean the universe is centralized.
Obviously you can have decentralized services that address this important 'presence' issue.
IMO the issue is that we have conflated the 'functional goal' with 'architecture'. The 'goal', for me at least, is public information systems that protect civil rights and resist the rise of tyranny. That goal, after thinking about this space for the past 25 years, can be served with a combination of centralized and decentralized services, and a mix of grassroots and corporate players.
To get there, we need (a) societal consensus that privacy in fact matters quite a lot to, and is a bedrock of, our civilization, and (b) [the recognition that] ideological bias is a deadly sin for a system architect.
Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I don't think that means the decentralized architecture has failed. I think people need to distinguish decentralization as a network system state, and decentralization as an affordance. Centralized structures on a decentralized protocol can reorganize themselves, but if you build the system as centralized, it's much harder, if not impossible, barring some implicit decentralized aspect of the architecture.
The question isn't so much "do decentralized systems end up as centralized," it is "can a disrupted decentralized system reorganize itself?"
It's obviously relevant to your point in that the reason for decentralized architectures, as you say, is to maintain communication in the presence of threats, especially to free exchange of information. It's not necessarily to maintain a given network structure state.
I couldn't care less if a handful of servers become dominant on Mastodon or IPFS or whatever, if it's easy to change which handful of servers they are should they start to become compromised in some way.
GRAB. FORK. It's all there. Nothing stops you. Sleepless nights, stay on your toes.
Nothing stops people from complaining either. And if you fork, people who didn't will begin complaining about you.
I've never really been a huge fan of twitter, and I got rid of failbook years ago, but masto fills the void without all the pain of the aforementioned other 'platforms'.
Bittorrent was 40% of the world's traffic, more than Google's at that point!
And we, my decentralized protocol, just grew from 2M to 15M monthly active users. ( https://github.com/amark/gun )
It seems to be working.
And honestly, it doesn't work as well. If you don't care about decentralization for decentralization sake its not ideal. Streaming websites don't use it. Netflix doesn't torrent a video to you.
Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will be widening inequality.
This is why redistributive policies are always going to be required. Democratizing the means of production, or even capital ownership itself, is never enough.
I'm not quite sure I get your example: so if you give it to the former you're more likely to produce closer to the extremely rich man with the socially corrosive advertising platform that has clear, real, marked destructive effects on entire country's political structures, the one that vapourised entire media businesses due to misinterpreted analytics, etc etc. The net negative effect of the hypothetical latter seems vastly less?
On the contrary, if you look at businesses where there is not huge consolidation, it is often because there is "market unfriendly" regulation. E.g. there are many rich car dealers spread throughout the US because they've put in place so many anti-competitive regulations. While I'd love it if Tesla could sell direct everywhere, it also means a lot of this wealth that currently stays relatively local would get sucked up by a Silicon Valley corporation. Same thing goes for Realtors and the real estate business.
As a consumer I love more open markets, but I don't think we've fully addressed the consequences of how this leads to greater inequality and consolidation of services.
The same people who consume also need to be either small business owners, freelancers, or employees. In fact without the money from that, they couldn't be consumers in the first place.
So what's bad for a consumer role can balance out or be very good if it helps keep more people making money as opposed to the "efficient single corporation with the minimal workforce" selling everything". Such corporations are how many small towns in America turned into wastelands...
You need middlemen, even if it's not the most efficient productivity wise, because it helps make more money go around, stay local, and keep communities livable.
The alternative is a future with a 20% working, a 0.01% corporate overlords with the top end having Bezos style riches, and 80% barely making ends meet, living in slums, and we're getting there...
Chile during the Pinochet Regime is an excellent example of the Neoliberal system not delivering on the promises, as hn_throwaway_99 mentioned, economies of scale simply take over any benefit of low gov friction "free markets", and any small advantage over time becomes an overwhelming one. At which point it simply becomes a mathematical snowball effect, reducing or removing government barriers of entry won't make your particular gadget or doodad be able to compete in quality nor cost against one produced by a huge mega-conglomerate, if anything that mega-conglomerate will see if it can steal your idea or buy the patent (gov!) so it can improve its own. It is the same thing that happens in South Korea with the Chaebols
Anyhow, point being, the Kansas Experiment failed[1], Chilean Chicago Boys Experiment failed to deliver after ~17 years of authoritarian rule(When Pinochet left power country had a ~40% poverty rate)[2]
This leads to the simple idea that the less friction your system has to accrue wealth the higher wealth inequality will be, and then the goal should be to make it as easy as possible for everybody to make their own start ups, but to create as much friction as possible for said startups to gain too much economy of scale momentum. Where the threshold of where that line would be, be left to policy makers, and ideally something politically independent, akin to the central bank
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-t...
[2] https://imgur.com/BpwMlBy
Pg17 United Nations Document https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_...
If such changes were brought about, the increased taxes could go towards things like infrastructure and social welfare, which would actually help people, unlike what billionaires pretend is fair compensation to their harms upon society, when in reality they give back very little. Bezos and Musk for example, both got into the space industry instead of putting a lot of their wealth back into philanthropy. The seeming odd one out is those who are like Bill Gates, who do actually give back a massive portion of their wealth.
It's actually below most western European countries in most global metrics, including such basics as infant mortality. It trumps most in gun deaths and incarceration rates though, so there's that...
E.g.
http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-world/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.h...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student...
And those countries have much less megacorps and "economies of scale"....
[1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
And before that WW2 levelled entire cities, like capital of Poland was obliterated as it was bombed once when Germans took it, once when the Polish rose up, then again as Soviets took it.
At the dawn of computer era there was a wall, landmines and machine gun nests going though the centre of Berlin.
Isolate your comparison to northern Europe, spared by war and Soviets, and the difference in GDP is no longer in US favour.
2) Just look at the chart I linked to - on decadal timescales, the EU was catching up to the US rapidly and then plateaued, in more than one cycle. No idea why, but something significant was happening and then stalling. Obviously history wasn't retroactively occurring and being eradicated.
1) You can't brush off foreign occupation 29 years ago as cherry picking. This dataset starts in 1960s, when all of Eastern Europe were soviet puppets. There is nothing comparable in recent US history.
Of course there is. What transition happened in the US in the 60s, that the country is still not completely out of? You'd know instantly if an American was using it as an excuse (as is quite common) for not matching various European metrics.
For one, the EU has dozens of ex Eastern Bloc communist countries (including areas of ex-USSR) which still play catch up and wages are still much lower.
Second, money is not everything. If the state, every day life, cost of living, etc is set up in a good way, you can get 2x or more the quality of life for half the money.
This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US which is what your average citizen truly cares about
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/few-see-eu-...
Post-Hard Brexit it will probably change, EU PPP has already been damaged by the current Brexit scandals, and the last few years of increased US Dollar interest rate has increased relative US PPP, but because of income inequality those financial changes aren't really transferred to the everyday US citizen
Also, the difference in raw incomes is mostly based of the so called "Exorbitant Privilege" the US has for having its currency be the default world reserve currency, it is quite easy to understand when one comprehends that the US central bank basically "prints gold", and that like ~60% of all international transactions are done abroad but with the US dollar as transaction medium
I find it rather unbelievable that things are cheaper in Europe. A few years back, I used to work for a multinational, which opened an office there, and some people I knew went and at least one or two stayed, which lead me to idly consider the idea of being an expat, and my cursory research indicated salaries are lower and the cost of living is higher.
What I proposed is the opposite: laws working against those mega-corporations in favor of many smaller corporations.
Only the people, through law, have the power to do that. The big corporate overlords, left to their own devices, wont be able to fix the problems they created. They will only make them worse.
My point is that it's trivially easy to understand the negatives of things like car dealers and real estate agents (pretty much everyone I know hates dealing with them), but I think we're just starting to come to terms with the potential negatives of having huge, geographically broad, open markets where there are very few winners.
It's a key reason why technological improvements tend to increase rather than decrease inequality. Technology, generally, appears to serve wealth and power.
I'm not fully convinced this is a universal rule, though it seems at the very least a strong bias. It seems to fall from the observation that "all machines are amplifiers", which means that all machines are force multipliers.
It may be that there are technologies which are dissipators and can be used to deflect or divert attacks, though these still seem to favour the more heavily-capitalised party. Shields rather than swords or range weapons, or perhaps distracting / obscuring capabilities.
What makes for decentralised systems is increased frictions, whether physical, political, cultural, or social.
Where transport is expensive, materials are locally sourced, talent participates locally, government and business operate locally.
It was the factory system, mass production, transport, and advertising which allowed one factory or manufacturer to serve the whole world. Mind: specialisation means that there are probably many individual niches which can be filled, though horizontal and veritical integration may carve into this as well.
You have very heavily centralized bureaucratic state makes all the choice and the majority of people making those choices are not elected.
Democracy has some decentralized elements, but its far, far, far away from what we would consider a decentralized system of government.
In an old 10th town in the middle east you might have 4 different legal systems for different communities, and then special extra layer of law and common practice for issues between these community (different for each set). Plus different higher imperial laws and so on. Each of these system had a variety of different systems of enforcement and financing. Non-centralized provision of every-thing we now call a public-service.
Democracies can and will bring 'more resources' to a war when the population is mostly behind it.
The points made generally (not limited to cryptocurrencies) are very well made. They parallel thinking I and others have been arriving at independently in recent years, after long swallowing the decentralised, crowdsourced, open source, distributed, mantra.
I won't say that that's failed entirely. But it's definitely failed to deliver what it promised.
DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN, and IPFS have negligible take-up so far as I'm aware, and I keep reasonable tabs on the space.
A previous HN post said it best: what decentralists want is to reclaim power from larger organizations—power over their data and identity, power to switch to a competitor's client or build their own, etc. It's similar to the right-to-repair movement that way.
The problem is that governments, corporations—groups really—can always be more powerful than an individual. That makes it advantageous to join one against your fellow individual. Plus once you pay your initiation fee to the group (usually giving up some autonomy), the marginal cost to you for additional members is often very low, or may even be outweighed by the marginal benefits, so you'll stay and the group aggregates members.
Perhaps a field of individuals constantly vigilant could band together to sunder any proto-group before it gains traction (and then they'd have to disband themselves before becoming the target). Though I imagine that would be a constant arms race to detect group formation, and we've all see how apathetic people are toward even flagrant digital malpractice.
Or maybe the government decrees that no company can have more than 10% market share. Bring on the conglomerates and umbrella corps.
Perhaps resources can't be efficiently decentralized, only stateless protocols. Is that alone worth the effort? There would still be vendor lock-in.
All I know is I want to wrest more power from corporations than I currently have over my digital experience without losing access to the resources they cloister.
Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of society.
You want decentralization because you want power.
Let me tell you a story about power and decentralization:
Many years ago a friend of mine an I were rambling in the Mission district (of SF) late at night. He said, "Hey, check this out." and made a kind of bird call. It was answered from several places within a few blocks around us, and we could hear other echoes further out as the call propagated. "Those are the people in the gangs."
Most of us just aren't that motivated.
"the history of the world is the history of warfare between secret societies" ~Ishmael Reed
Wait, what is the idea that "the system has an intent" based on?
One aspect is the existential angst of the species, i.e. "Which is worse? That the world is ruled by the Iluminati. or that it isn't?" Is there a God or do we really have to do the job ourselves? Are we the victims of chance in an uncaring universe, and the sweep of progress merely an illusion? Or are we in fact the self-creating Telos of a sentient Universe?
Does Humanity have a Soul? If not, can we Create one?
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Even if we suppose that "the system" is ruled by an elite (which is arguably true†) can we suppose that the elite is unified and harmonious in their intent? Or are we caught up in "warfare between secret societies" after all? Certainly the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 can't be part of any sane plan, can it?
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In one of the Subgenius books there's a story about how humanity is actually a biological weapon of the anaerobic microbes used in their ancient war with the oxygen-breathers, and the current climate crisis is their gambit, we're doing our jobs.
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All I'm really saying is that both "system" and "intent" are open-ended terms...
"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
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But yeah, the Internet et. al. are basically working in the way that the elite want them to to keep control of the masses, however imperfectly. Watch Hong Kong and you can see "the system" adapt in near-real-time. The next episode is happening right now.
† "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens"
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Also: messaging is actually a very important part of social media companies' strategy (e.g. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.).
You would have profile providers and interaction providers, and any of us would subscribe ourselves into the services we want to use, disconnecting whenever we didn't want to use e.g. Twitter or wanted to take a break. Within these joins, a person could control which of their PII they want to allow the service to have access to. You could run your own PII provider or join/pay for someone else to run it.
I think someone pointed out that "decentralization" is different from "democratization" and I would wholeheartedly agree. I think of both as independent variables which can be tuned in the construction of any organizational structure. Also to me the idea that democracy, as it pertains to business structures, should also be something that is tunable.
Projects like DAO's are great examples if highly distributed yet fairly undemocratic structures. As the core team creating them (and often monetizing them) do not nessecarily share power in the direction of the project. I am not advocating for or against that but just pointing it out.
But as history has shown there are real tradeoffs when you try and reach scale (in whatever metric) when you centralize democracy. It's my view that there is a sweet spot (and serious upside) for introducing decentralization and democratization into most projects, but it all depends on the use case. As a few examples take a look at the success of projects like stocksy.com (royalty based stock images company owned by the contributors), smart.coop (freelancers cooperative that handles contracts and billing). And of course Mondragon (https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/) which takes democracy in the workplace to an industrial scale.
At my current company (https://www.staffing.coop and https://www.tribeworks.io) we decided to form as a cooperative (instead of using a DAO) because it better fit our current needs. But we don't see this as a static choice.