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Ask HN: Should I bother decentralizing my website?

5 points by Mattasher ↗ HN
I run a small but growing community site. I built it with privacy and censorship resistance in mind, using pki instead of a traditional login system. However, I estimate that making it fully decentralized would take at least a month of my development time. Given that the site is not specifically targeted at tech savvy users, do you think that’s worth doing?

13 comments

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ceejayoz
You should explain what you mean by decentralized.

A CDN? Serverless on something like Cloudflare's workers?

Mattasher
* All content mirrored on IPFS or Storj or whatever

* All transactions on the content made available and properly structured into a DAG of signed documents

* Make the API public and open source so people can run their own peers (basically, federation of access points)

ceejayoz
I don't think that's worth the work for most tech-savvy audiences, let alone a non tech-savvy one.
Mattasher
Thanks. I'm trying to gauge whether people think decentralization (and censorship/deplatforming resistance) will be a strong draw in an era of dissatisfaction with dominant social media and community sites. I'll take that as a strong No from your perspective.
peruvian
If it's not targeted at tech savvy users (even then, most tech savvy users wouldn't care) and you don't feel any moral/personal drive, don't bother.
gtirloni
I'm curious, wouldn't PKI be less anonymous than username/password?
Mattasher
How so? To give more detail about the system, users generate private keys client side, which are used to sign their requests. Providing an email address is optional, and even (initial) usernames are randomly generated.
gtirloni
I was thinking about non-repudiation [0]. It seems with the keys, you could have more certainty that they are who they are (e.g. stolen password vs stolen private key file). But just thinking about it now, I don't think it matters for anonymity that much.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation

ned7
It depends on your users need and the service you provide. Usually decentralization is thought of when you want to avoid Single-Points-of-Failure in a network or when you are giving a service that can't work properly without multiple nodes contributing to it.
Mattasher
Current user don't need it, but I'm wondering if the benefits will be a strong draw for users dissatisfied with the current oligopoly of gatekeepers in community and social publishing.
psv1
I'm really put off by the movement towards decentralization for the sake of decentralization. Over the past couple of years the term has been thrown around as if decentralization is good by default regardless of the actual application and use case and I'm just not sold on the benefits. Of course, some of this might just be my personal bias