I got to the end of the article still unsure of what the author means by “work”. All his examples work just fine; most work brilliantly for their intended purpose. Does he mean that they are not effective for generating profit for some sleazy corporation? I don’t see why I should care.
I think the point the author is making is that none of these systems are a distributed panacea free from corporate overlords. All of them are either dying/obscure (irc, matrix, rss) or have been infested with powerful actors who have become de-facto centralized nodes (email, WWW, RSS, git). I'm not sure how that relates with the authors stated thesis of profit motives being misaligned. I guess they're arguing that for a system to be succesful it needs corporate investment, people make money out of controlling a centralized node, you cant make money out of the anarchism of a true decentralized system, hence decentralized systems will either fail or be subverted by centralized actors (maybe im reading in my own beliefs?).
Which may be true, but i didn't find the evidence presented particularly compelling, and the structure of the argument was confusing.
Most people don't matter and yeah, they 'll always prefer the prepackaged, "curated", high sugar content. The role of the decentralized web is to provide an infinite-frontier alternative so that ideas can grow outside the pettiness and the boxes of the mainstream. And yes, they do work for that
I certainly found it simpler to hard-code my own website than make either Wordpress or Hugo do what I wanted it to do. My host provides metrics and all the technical things with DNS, and search engines and my own network deliver me visitors. Browsers in 2021 are very powerful at turning simple HTML into something pretty. If one search engine blacklisted my site, people who are in to what I am in to would switch to another which does not.
I think that the "abusive relationship with platforms like Medium, Twitter, and Instagram" is mostly psychological.
This is a really myopic view on uses of crypto and the BitTorrent protocol. There's so much more going on than criminal applications.
BitTorrent is used in a lot of settings for data distribution and for software distribution. Saying it's just for pirating reveals the author's laziness. Several of these use-cases are listed in the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start.
Also the author laments that bittorrent is not used for 1:1 transfers. Bittorrent's strength is in distributing bandwidth for popular files. Direct file transfers between people who know each other isn't really its target. So i feel that's a pretty unfair criticism.
You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.
I think Bittorrent could be made usable for 1:1 transfers. The building blocks are there. But you'd have to streamline the process and build a client optimized for that case instead of the more common usage. The main missing piece would be a standardized encryption format. That doesn't really need protocol changes, just a storage-level convention how the data is encrypted before turning it into a torrent.
Agreed, but I don't think there's a lot of motivation to do so. At that point, BitTorrent is just DCC in a new fur coat. As stated earlier, BT is most appropriately used in a setting where you want to download a single file from multiple sources, distributing the workload between them and your network. This results in faster downloads, and does so in a way that is decentralized (for the most part) and scalable by design.
So while it could be done, the question is really "should it be done"? I'd love to be able to send a file over the internet easily without using some centralized service, but if there's only 2 people that are meant to have the file, does the overhead of BitTorrent make any sense?
Webtorrent is not fully decentralized since webrtc needs signalling servers for each session (you can't even store credentials in a cache and reuse them later) and it doesn't have a DHT since UDP isn't available in browsers.
I really wish magic wormhole worked conveniently on windows without obliging me to install python and pip and such. It's my go-to when sftp isn't an option, but for sftp not to be an option almost always means that one of the computers I'm trying to transfer between is a windows box.
Wormhole requirement: "the URL of a publicly-available Rendezvous Server"
This means its not a self-sovereign system, like Bittorrent, GIT, and Bitcoin. Its no different then a central Napster server, the one that got dragged into court on November 1999. Scientists are still working on creating self-sovereign peer-to-peer systems. Its hard, but we're going to solve it in coming years.
Scientific community: "International Workshop series on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good", https://dicg2020.github.io/ (disclaimer: involved scientist)
First time I hear about Magic Whatever™. Any modern download tool needs to be embedded into browsers and mobile OSes for it to have any chance these days.
I haven't seen any regular user use a separate download tool or a download manager for a decade or more.
Except for BitTorrent clients, but those aren't targeted at 1:1, of course :-)
Its used by hundreds of millions to share popular files between themselves.
Sharing files 1:1 is easier and more efficient with sFTP or other protocols.
"was" is an important word in the first sentence there. They finished moving away from BitTorrent in 2013, and they'd phased out actual p2p transfers in favor of just using the BT client to download from a web seed a while before that.
This article is laughably bad. I'm not even sure it's worth the time to give a counter response. The BitTorrent comment he made is objectively false and can be proven as such. Tons of game installers use torrents under the hood to distribute their massive game payloads.
If BitTorrent is so great why isn’t it used more today for file transfers vs hosted storage? Also it is mostly used for piracy because authorities cannot shut down a decentralized system.
Because browsers (except only Opera, it's Norwegian) don't want to turn on built-in torrent downloader, only because they know they'd got troubles from RIAA folks. There are some websites that offer downloads through torrents, like linux distros.
Aside from association with piracy and not being a dropbox alternative because you have to keep the seeder online, it's more expensive for network operators than CDNs, connections often have much more downstream bandwidth, and connections are still sometimes capped. If you're Netflix or an ISP, you're better off getting ISPs to put your hardware in their facilities than having users seed content. The most interesting, viable application I've seen for Bittorrent-like technology is Microsoft seeding updates on a LAN.
> As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start.
I followed your recommendation and this is what I found: bitcoin might, in theory, work for the purpose of sending remittances, but in practice it doesn't.
So, returning to the original question, can cryptocurrencies offer an innovative solution for migrant remittances to developing countries? Yes and no. In theory, cryptocurrencies can really provide an effective and economical channel for money transfers to help alleviate poverty through remittances. However, there are two principle problems. Firstly, coins such as Bitcoin remain too volatile, in fact ten times more volatile than major currencies (Baur & Dimpfl 2021). This means that if migrants were to use such channel they would be exposing themselves to extreme risks. But, more importantly users of bitcoin may find themselves victims of speculative attacks, as the cryptocurrencies’ value remains completely speculatively constructed. Secondly, as with international bank transfers, cryptocurrencies need a bank account to buy and sell it. As explained above, having a bank account is not a given and represents a high barrier to entry for many of the poorest migrants.
Go learn what Strike just achieved in El Salvador for example. It works in practice and in theory. A big issue is people barely understand Bitcoin and then they try to crtitize it and always seem to fail spectacularly
if I recall correctly, Blizzard's updater uses Bittorrent to distribute updates for WoW and other applications. So I'm confused by the fact people still focus on the piracy aspect of Bittorrent when there's been many commercial uses of the platform.
Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream?
BitTorrent is great but I wouldn’t exactly call it mainstream. I do wish more sites used it for downloads though.
I haven’t sat down and researched this, but an argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts?
Email definitely counts as a decentralized protocol. Sure, in practice, it's fairly centralized. Most people use Gmail. But you don't have to. That's the key.
If for some reason you don't want to use Google's platform, you're 100% free of creating your own mail server. The crazy thing is that it will probably work out just fine. The mail client/server model is really popular. You can go ahead and DIY your email and use all the popular clients without issue (maybe except Gmail? idk).
And sure, if you somehow become famous in a way Google doesn't like, they can effectively cut you off from lots of other people by not federating with your email server. In practice, though, this is probably pretty uncommon.
Email is a great example, despite what the article says. You can certainly have email without Google. If fact, Microsoft may actually be bigger in the business world.
A lot of large companies also run their own servers, consumers can use icloud, protonmail, yahoo,... or the one from their ISP.
The argument in the article is that GMail controls email. It is definitely not true. Email is still how people do business, and business email is not owned by Google.
Blizzard's game launcher (use to?) downloads the games via Torrent. E.g. starcraft II, world of war craft, etc. That's pretty damn mainstream.
A lot of older networked games were, probably some modern ones too. One player hosts the game (either picked automatically by the match making system, or by running a game server listed by a index server), and everyone else connects to them. Call of duty, counter strike, starcraft, etc.
As other people mentioned the internet, also texting and telephones, but the peers in this example are really big. I think some of the bank transfer stuff is also a "distributed" system with big peers.
> Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream?
People have mentioned email and the Web as examples; I'd also throw in podcasts. (None of these are "apps," per se, but they're all examples from the article, so.)
> An argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts?
Yes. :)
The article makes the point, in so many words, that a lot of decentralized services end up dominated by a small number of major players. I think this is hard to argue with; yes, there are other service providers competing with the big ones, but that doesn't disprove the point. The most recent figures I can find suggest that Gmail had 43% of the email "market" in 2020; that's not more than everyone else combined, but number two is Yahoo (!) at 26%, with third place Outlook (i.e., the email service Microsoft keeps changing the name of, not the client application) trailing at 6%. Many people who might have been bloggers a bit over a decade ago use Medium or, more likely, just Twitter. (I think Twitter did far more to kill the blog than the death of Google Reader, but that's a different topic.) We can go on.
Where I think the article gets it wrong isn't in its description of the problem, it's in its diagnosis. Partially. I think the author is right in saying that better tooling isn't the problem, but wrong in saying that the profit motive is in "ensuring decentrialized systems fail." The profit motive is, to borrow your apt phrase, in making centralized systems trusted, available, and resilient. GitHub, Google Workspace, and Slack took over as much of the business world as they did because they're not only easier to set up than doing it yourself, they gain the benefits of a tremendous userbase: they're highly available and resilient, they're well-understood, they have lots of integration plugins.
I'd love to see more decentralized/federated systems succeed, but many of them aren't just fiddly and quirky, they're proudly fiddly and quirky. If they're going to take off, we may need to focus less on where we think companies behind centralized services are deviously undermining their decentralized relatives, and focus more on why those services succeeded in the first place.
> ... an argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts?
Not necessarily. They will still need an open protocol, good documentation, etc. And even then, it may not be suitable for what you are doing (and yet, they try to use it anyways). Furthermore, it won't necessarily always be available; you cannot predict some things that will go wrong with it. And, you cannot really trust them for sure either, necessarily.
The author's definition of what makes a "decentralized application" is too strong and I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server.
To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. You can buy a domain and use Proton, Fastmail, or any other provider to have your own email. If you become unhappy with them, it's easy to move. We have open specs that allow every service to interoperate, so you don't need to know or care what provider your recipient is using.
I think that's the problem with 99% of articles about decentralized/federated/etc systems. Nobody can agree on what properties they want and everyone ends up talking past each other.
Exactly that is both the strength and the weakness. The strength consists in the inability of any one party to dominate the network. The weakness is the noise and ineffectiveness of communication.
Whether or not its possible for one party to dominate the network is one of the potential properties of a "distributed" system that people cannot agree on if its required in the definition.
For example, napster, TOR and IRC are arguably "distributed" systems where there is a central party that controls the network.
yes of course, the article is giving examples how systems with distributed ownership are failing because not everyone cares about that. so distributed ownership is what she is interested in, and hence that is the topic of our discussion.
That may be so, although the author's own words doesn't clearly state that ("To clarify what I mean by decentralised: applications whose main purpose is fulfilled as part of a network, where that network is not reliant on any preordained nodes." - nothing about ownership there. Master<->Master db replication meets that definition, but is petty clearly not the type of thing you are referring to. Regardless in context you're probably right abouy which definition the author is using).
Nonetheless, that doesn't make it any less of a problem that the definitions are severely overloaded. The issue is not that the article is unclear in its definitions (even though it is imo), the issue is that its hard to have discussions about the topic and compare to other articles, because people talk past each other. Words having agreed meanings is important so we can connect ideas to a broader context and not just talk about individual articles in isolation.
well not quite. since nicks and channels are replicated across all servers it should be clear that any irc op can control all nicks and channels. hence control is centralized and its merely distributed-replicated on a technical level even if governance is so trusting as to allow anyone to join.
distributed ownership, aka federation does not require trust between operators as each operator is trusted only to manage their own servers without being able to control entities that originate from other servers
often times when debating another professional we'll start things off by laying out exactly how we're using each term, and for the extent of the debate we'll agree on some specific definitions, or sometimes even make up temporary nonsense words so that the debate can be productive.
It's important to be able to pick which server you use, if only servers maintained by app developers are allowed companies like Apple dictate the moderation policies.
I don't think so as there exist centralized, open protocols.
Email is (at the server level) a peer to peer network, only tied to DNS/BGP as the only central points, with a global namespace. That can't be said for a lot of open standards.
Calling decentralised software centralised because companies built good defaults on top is a fallacy. Email, the web and torrents are definitely success story.
I don't like cryptocurrencies (those who are unbacked and resource hungry, I like the tech behind) but bringing payments in the software world and out of financial gatekeepers could exactly the missing piece of the puzzle to have even more working decentralised apps.
Recognising this doesn't help with criticising capitalism, I guess.
It isn't a fallacy, and in any case the article isn't claiming that decentralised software has become centralised because companies have built good defaults on top, so that's a complete strawman.
Protocols like e-mail, Mastodon and Matrix where the server-to-server protocol is decentralized/peer-to-peer but clients interact with the network through designated servers are generally considered "federated" (which can be either considered as distinct from or a subset of "decentralized")
So the author seems to take "decentralized" here to mean "fully decentralized and peer-to-peer", which is indeed an unconventionally strong definition. But later on, they mention IRC, which is centralized by any definition... Actually, the author doesn't seem to be working from a strong definition at all and they seem to have given this very shallow thought and research.
Their definition seems less strong and different than portrayed in your comment. Below is the definition from the article.
"To clarify what I mean by decentralised: applications whose main purpose is fulfilled as part of a network, where that network is not reliant on any preordained nodes. Decentralised applications are also known as “federated”. There is also a more specific term “distributed”, also known as “peer to peer”. I won’t cover the distinction with the more specific terms because it’s not relevant here. I use the word application in a looser sense, to also cover protocols and specifications."
I somehow glanced over this, thanks for pointing it out. This definition suggests that "federated" is strictly equal to "decentralized", which is coincidentally not strictly in conflict with what I wrote (though a very unorthodox definition of federated, as it doesn't imply any federation).
Even so, IRC has no business in this list per the authors definition.
> Even so, IRC has no business in this list per the authors definition.
The "network" part is arguable, but IRC does not require any pre-ordained nodes, which matches the author's definition.
It's a small part of full decentralization, but an important one. Being able to point your Facebook Messenger client at a different server would be a big step.
> Being able to point your Facebook Messenger client at a different server would be a big step.
Interestingly, you used to be able to do the inverse: point your XMPP client at Facebook Messenger. I'm pretty sure they never supported federation, but you could connect clients to multiple servers and have a relatively seamless experience from a single client.
I must correct you here on "Protocols like Mastodon". The protocol that underlies the Fediverse is the W3C ActivityPub Recommendation [0] and making that distinction is really important. Not doing so would encourage centralization in the same ways as discussed elsewhere in this thread for Email vs. Gmail.
Mastodon is just a fediverse app that was an early adopter of ActivityPub, and managed to become quite popular. Part of this due to a better productization, and the jumpstart this gave them offering the best features first. To many newcomers Fediverse === Mastodon, but - while understandable - this is massively shortselling the interop capabilities of the protocol.
What has already happened by Mastodon dominance is that they are driving the technological direction, but not necessarily in the best possible way and to the overall benefit of the Fediverse. They have a custom client API for instance that is becoming a de-facto standard, adopted by others out of convenience.
Your point would be true if ActivityPub was a properly defined specification, but it isn't. It is voluntarily vague in many places to accommodate for the differences in implementations, which means that each implementation needs to understand how other software works to interoperate. So in practice it is more accurate to say "Protocol like Mastodon", because even if you can talk with Mastodon it doesn't mean you can talk with Pleroma or Pixelfeed or others.
> I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server.
I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of a decentralised application.
Email and the web are decentralised applications. But they are not the email and the web of the 1990s, when their decentralisation was the killer feature that saw them beat out centralised networks. To try and live on a non-Google/non-Facebook web is like using Linux on the desktop in 2000: it's certainly possible, but it's a bit of a hairshirt.
Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.
Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could never do on their own server and those who could would be spending a lot of time training the blocker which those using Google never even needed to think of.
This seems to be a rule - “inbound” decentralized systems are susceptible to the spam problem - but “outbound” ones like DNS seem to work OK. Nobody cares if you create fifty billion sub domains.
I’ve occasionally wondered why the responsibility to mitigate abuse can’t be pushed all the way out to edge nodes (individual ISPs and data centers) instead of relying on centralized abuse prevention. I imagine this does happen for certain kinds of abuse, but wouldn’t the threat of others not peering with your node be good motivation for ISPs not to provide services to spammers?
That's one big part of what Google does, and it's part of why it's so hard to get Google to accept self hosted email. They have a list of known good hosts (that they effectively "peer" with), and if you're not on that list your mail may or may not make it into a Gmail inbox.
> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.
No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com
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My browser is up-to-date, their "download now" link takes you to their own download page with a custom Firefox download. They seem like call center scammer level scum. Wonder why Mozzila is allowing them to use their trademarks like this.
the name is not as good as hotmail, mainly because the standard pronunciation is geemail, meaning that back when the name was not well known you could theoretically say gmail.com to someone and they might think you had said email.com if they were a little hard of hearing or your enunciation was not clear.
the implementation however was much better than hotmail or any other web-based email at the time.
To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.
> the name is not as good as hotmail, mainly because the standard pronunciation is geemail, meaning that back when the name was not well known you could theoretically say gmail.com to someone and they might think you had said email.com if they were a little hard of hearing or your enunciation was not clear
gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations. Hotmail and yahoo mail sounded like idiotic kid email addresses. Webmail never tried doing email. Pobox.com did only forwarding and was too linked to the physical mail in the mind of people. Same went for mailboxes.com.
> To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.
Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).
>gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations
yes, to us (the techies), but there are billions of people in the world who didn't know who or what gmail was for a at least 4-5 years. I specifically made the observation of geemail sounding like email because I had that experienced less than a decade ago giving the address to a dentist's secretary in Denmark.
>Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).
first of all I'd say Google had a great product and ok marketing for a few years, nowadays they have great marketing, an ok product, and built in market dominance.
So I suppose I can accept that good marketing is a prerequisite but not sufficient.
That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.
And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?
> yes, to us (the techies), but there are billions of people in the world who didn't know who or what gmail was for a at least 4-5 years. I specifically made the observation of geemail sounding like email because I had that experienced less than a decade ago giving the address to a dentist's secretary in Denmark.
I would say you have to look at the alternative names - hotmail? yahoo.com? gmail sounds like a fantastic choice.
> That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.
Your target customers know who you are.
> And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?
Random people are not customers of Thomson Reuters and Thompson Reuters is not in a market of converting them. Those that consume news content as a part of their product know who Thompson Reuters is.
Spam seems pretty "solved" (if one can call it that) problem nowadays though. Most people who run their own servers simply put SpamAssassin and a couple of other tweaks; not much fuss is needed anymore.
I second that. At work we run our own email server (50 people company). I receive single spam message maybe like once in two weeks. With a Gmail home account I have that once in a month.
A slightly more problematic is targeted phishing attacks, where the attackers try to put at least some work-relevant information “. Some of those attempts are not so trivial. I do receive them few times per year, while with GMail I do not remember getting one in at least a year. But on other hand I am not so sure that Google will defend against those if we have used GMail at work.
> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could never do on their own server
I'm sure most normal people could install SpamAssassin and configure it to use community blacklists on their Dovecot/Postfix server. It's not that hard.
I run a mailinabox server for almost half a year and gmail is a pita. I send an email to a gmail user and it always goes into spam. I have to phone them to unspam it but next day same thing.
Yahoo mail or others dont seem have this issue because I have 10/10 on the dkim something scorecard.
Google somehow wants to force me to not use my email server. Fuck them
Hm, personally I feel Google is cheating. While they catch also all spam they also catch a lot of legitimate mails. I have a couple of accounts at Google and one at a company which uses SoamAssasin and I prefer that SoamAssasin setup since it has way less false positives but still catch most spam.
I'm not convinced Google really solved spam, they're just not afraid to turn the sensitivity on the filter way up even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam. Most smaller admins seem concerned about correctness and so they don't do this.
I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.
I was there when they launched Gmail. I had an email account at almost every other big provider. Most of them were full of spam. Gmail was clean and the amount of legitimate emails misclassified was insignificant.
Everyone else had to up their game due to Gmail. On all fronts.
even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam
Obviously a personal anecdote, but I signed up for Gmail close to when it first came out, and I don't think I've ever had a legitimate piece of mail marked as spam.
I remember people clamoring to sign up for Gmail because it was the new thing, it had the counter that kept going up with "a lot" of storage space, etc. Folks were even paying others for a Gmail invite.
Honestly, over years I think the amount of emails that were marked as spam but actually weren't (they were news letters that I didn't consider as spam but also were not important)
was below 5, I think.
meanwhile tons of spam (crypto related) is marked as spam, without that it'd be pain enter my mailbox
Anecdote: although I have spamassassin set up to add a header to my email, my filter for moving likely spam into the appropriate folder is currently commented out, because I get so little spam. I get a very small amount at my public GitHub address, and a little more at one address that is in the source code of a FLO (free/libre/open) app I maintain, but it totals maybe one or two emails a month.
Public organizational emails in orgs I've been a part of (e.g. admin@example.com, community@example.com) get a little more spam, largely sales pitches from what appears to be actual humans at shady SEO companies. Maybe 2 a week.
I get way more "legitimate" corporate spam than actual unprompted/cold spam. The most egregious example in recent memory was when I made an online purchase at Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and made sure the "sign me up for the email list" checkbox was not selected. They sent me no fewer than four emails asking if I would like to sign up for their email list, including one titled, "Thanks for signing up for our email list!" (inside: "Just take this one last step to confirm your subscription <signup link>").
In conclusion, I perceive unwanted email to be largely a self-inflicted problem at present. For example, someone I know likes to complain about the quantity of email she receives, but also refuses to unsubscribe, because sometimes she sees something interesting in one of the many promotional lists she's on. I also don't understand people who say they're not bothered by advertising, but to each her own.
Agreed. After moving away from Gmail about 6 months ago to Namecheap Private Email, I am impressed at how little spam I get. It has SpamAssassin which is quite effective, but the overall spam volume is significantly lower than 10 years ago… and this is an old email address and domain I’m using, not new.
I just counted emails in my spam folder, and it is between 6 and 10 per day. Email I actually subscribed to or from other legit sources is in the range of 12-20, almost exactly twice of spam. I am not counting days when I do a contradictory post on local tech resource and getting hundreds of reply notifications.
Interesting. I assume you have a single email address, so you can't tell the source? (I have a catch-all at my domain ⇒ I use a different email for each site, which is how I know which addresses generate spam). Is your address posted publicly in plain-text somewhere?
Yes, it is a Gmail address, from the beginning of Gmail itself. I beleive it was exposed countless times since. This thread made me think about changing that and get a new address on a personal domain.
it’s not written clearly, but google does tend to spam filter email from independent domains along with all the obvious spam. they use a legitimate feature as a cudgel against competitors and to lock-in all that juicy personal data flow. it’s one thing to compete with a better spam filter. it’s another to aim it at potential competitors. pretty despicable actually.
Spam filtering is very hard. Therefore there are some content based rules and some sender based rules. Google is very good at both of those, which means in this context means accuracy and precision based on content and strictness based on sender. Sender based rules make it hard for spammers to send mail pretending to be from a domain, but does make it harder for anyone to send mail. Hosting your own mail server means hosting the authorization architecture to prove you're not a spammer, which makes it harder.
I don't work at google nor have any details on this, but I would assume that just because they could detect it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a cost and blocking things which don't meet some minimum trust level from Google's perspective would cut a lot of the noise down from naive spamming.
> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering.
I wish this meme could die. gmail spam filtering isn't particularly good, it never has been. They crank up the false positive rate high enough that the spam in your inbox is about comparable to other solutions, but at the expense of tons of false positives.
I've had a gmail account since the launch. Been there got the tshirt (literally.. have a tshirt of the launch when they were bragging about 1GB storage). I've also been managing email servers and mailing lists since the very early 90s to today.
Notice every site that interacts with email has the ubiquitous warning abot "check your spam folder"? Not solely, but largely a legacy of so many users on gmail getting used to so much legitimate email going to spam. it doesn't have to be that way.
You can easily to an order of magnitude better on fewer false positives while still getting less spam overall in your inbox, by running your own email servers.
I haven't had a false positive in ... certainly many years on my own email on my servers. And a bit less spam getting through than on the gmail account.
> Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.
gmail has a big false positive problem, yes, but it isn't any worse for you as a sender if you run your own email servers. I experience more false positives emailing from work account to work account (both sides hosted by gmail) than from personal account (hosted by me) to gmail.
> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well
Spam filtering is actually not hard anymore. I've been running email servers and mailing lists from before spam existed, through its rise and later fall. There was a time, ca.2000, when it was hard. Because nearly every legitimate email server was misconfigured, so one had to allow it all through, but most was spam. So it took a lot of client side filtering.
These days, very easy. Legitimate senders are well configured, so just reject all misconfigured clients at the SMTP connection. There, that's 95%+ of spam blocked. The few remaining items are easily filtered by whichever bayesian filter you like. I'm using spamprobe. Done. No spam. No false positives.
I think that's a fair characterisation of her premises. For instance, she argues that these outcomes aren't happening because of any systematic quality difference in the products: many centralised products that win significant marketshare are a bit ordinary. I'm not in a position to judge that claim; I tend to avoid products that make gratuitous demands on my personal data so I have less material to compare, but the idea that a universal Electron app is better than a variety of independently developed native apps is certainly not one I would rush to accept.
Her actual conclusion is that in order to create a market whose average members are free, we need more regulation.
She'd be wrong about that too. Just look at how much better email is than instant messaging. It has succeeded infinitely more at being a decentralized application than IM.
Well that is an argument no-one is making. No one is comparing email and IM and asking which is succeeding better at being a decentralised application. You're right: email is certainly less centralised than Whatsapp. But it's a red herring. The comparison is between the original implementation of email as a decentralised system and the current experience of email, which is highly centralised.
In the olden days, any business could say in good faith "I want to offer email services" and they would have been treated pretty much the same as any other good faith provider of email service. But today, a business who wanted to start up an email service is insane; just check out the nearby thread of a person who replaced Mailchimp with a semi-self-rolled service. As a matter of fact, no matter what the RFCs say, people in the industry do not treat email as decentralised.
This is partially because people joined the network in bad faith, but it's also because a small number of large nodes are able to assume anyone who isn't known to them is acting in bad faith and therefore force people towards the larger nodes.
As I said before, email and the web continue to be usable in a decentralised fashion, but to do so involves wearing a hairshirt. This is the failure of decentralised applications. The author of the article has a view that is closer to "the market is only as free as its weaker members" rather than the view more fashionable hereabouts "the market is only as free as its stronger members", which leads to a different conclusion. It would probably lead to more insightful disagreements to discuss this underlying difference rather than arguing about what technologies email is less centralised than. (Edit to clairfy: These things in quotation marks are not quotes. The quotation marks are used to help delimit the propositions.)
My point is that it's better than the alternative. A "failed" decentralized protocol like SMTP is better than several "successful" silo'ed IM clients, payment providers, forum platforms, etc. Framing it as a failure without context leaves out the important detail that it's still more successful than centralized but balkanized solutions.
> To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship.
I'm confused, because it seems like you agree with the author. She says
>> My statement that email can be used without involving Google is technically true, but anyone they blacklist will quickly realise that they’re largely locked out of the global email network.
She is stating that the problem with email isn't that it is an open network, but that it is effectively centralized by a few big players. It might as well be a centralized service. The protocol may be open but if you aren't using a major centralized service you're going to experience a lot more difficulty, including potentially being black listed by these big players. Just getting accidentally classified as spam on one of them and you will locked out. Not to mention dealing with all the spam if you roll your own.
> If you become unhappy with them, it's easy to move.
I think this is an absurd statement and you know it or you are lying to yourself. Sure, forwarding exists but that's not exactly moving. If you've ever tried moving email addresses you'd know how difficult this is. It's significantly harder than moving phone numbers, which also isn't that easy. Just think of every account that you now need to modify. Sure, you don't need to port every account, but there's more than you probably think.
Do you have any advice how to best move the old emails to the new IMAP account?
My current provider started getting flaky when they were bought out by a larger one, but I've been putting it off for years trying to move. Maybe offlineimap to a local box, probably best to have your own backup anyway.
Using the terminology most commonly found in the crypto space, email is not decentralized but rather federated. This is because participation in the email ecosystem requires permission from other participants in the email ecosystem. If only 5% of the ecosystem is willing to forward your emails, most of your emails aren't going to make it to their destination.
Conversely, in the blockchain space anyone can participate in the blockchain. If a miner refuses to mine your transactions, that's profit that another miner can pick up. And if worst comes to worst, you can set up your own mining infrastructure and mine that transaction yourself - if the system is working correctly, you never need permission from someone else at all to participate. (there are some assumptions here, and if you choose to reject those assumptions as valid you can reasonably claim that blockchains aren't decentralized either)
The email address does have my own domain name. This way, responses are sent correctly. The ISP is used as a "smart host" to relay the outgoing messages, while incoming messages come in directly; this is provided as an option when setting up Exim using the package manager.
In life, nothing is perfect. For example, I can't use a CPU based on an open ISA as my daily driver. Does that mean that CPUs "don't work"? Of course not.
The fact that something is used for illegal purposes means that it doesn't work? Does LSD "not work"?
The fact that something is hard to set up or maintain mean that it doesn't work? Does Linux not work? Do airplanes not work?
Does the fact that something is an environmental disaster mean that it doesn't work? Do cars not work? Do highways not work?
I think the idea of 'work' is not in a technical sense but in a business and social sense: does it see success at a large scale? As things get larger, they get harder to judge, so asking that about Linux and all airplanes and open source ISAs is kind of irrelevantly difficult, whereas it's pretty easy to talk about Matrix 'not working': I don't use it, my school doesn't use it, etc. It hasn't seen widespread adoption and success. To restate the OP with this definition, decentralized applications that do 'work' (see widespread success) are all 'owned' by some unknowably large corporation (Google for email, GitHub for Git, etc) in a way that emulates centralized applications (the restriction of traditional decentralized freedoms talked about in the article). Out of this, the post makes the point that if we see decentralized systems as 'good', then we have to face this as a failure of the 'free market' and try to think of or move to something better.
I agree with your sentiment. The style you chose to express it makes it hard to read. It seems unnecessarily defensive, sort of like someone poking me in the chest to make a point about something that I don’t feel emotional about.
This defensive tone is one of the few ways I have found to make myself understood clearly without overthinking my prose.
When I write in more "narrative" tone, it's hard for me to make sure that my grammar is right, and that I'm making myself understood.
In fact, I always try to write my comments in narrative form first, but many times the grammar comes out awkward, so I scrap that and write in a more dialogical form.
If you have any recommendations on how to improve this, they're welcome.
Each of those perspectives is in fact taken by many people. From the government's perspective, if something is used for illegal purposes, that's a severe defect and the thing isn't working. From Greenpeace's perspective, cars do not work.
None of that is relevant to the people who use drug marketplaces or cars, but those are different people.
I think the author's underlying point is that all of the decentralised applications she's talking about rely on their having a large number of users communicating with one another in order to do what they're supposed to do, and that decentralised systems often perform poorly in terms of getting enough users for them to achieve that goal.
Imagine you came up with a technically superior version of email, and it functioned technically perfectly, but you were unable to convince anyone else to use it. Sure, it would "work" technically in a narrow functional sense, but it wouldn't "work" in terms of doing what it was actually designed to do. My taking LSD isn't really affected by other people doing so or not: it's a private thing. But my sending an email is: it's a network interaction.
The author's claim is correct in the sense that, if you hold a party and no-one comes, the party didn't really work.
Peer discovery and secure cookie is what got me. Not really decentralized if you rely on DNS or DHTs. Secure cookie makes it stateful without access to javascript. It makes more business sense not to innovate. Just do the job right with proven solutions. Not like there's a surplus of knowledge.
> Proprietary centralised services like Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, etc. dominate, most likely because they have the marketing budget for it.
They dominate because they're better for end users who don't mind giving up compatibility/freedom to implement their own client, which the vast majority of people don't want to do. Slack/Discord/WhatsApp are far better instant messaging/voice or video conferencing software than IRC.
Exactly. IRC is old, perhaps not as old as DNS, but old. Slack et al took off because the UX of IRC is shite. If someone had built a slack-like IRC client and worked on getting people to use it, maybe IRC would be the common protocol. Heck, it could still happen - people really have no loyalty to slack or teams; it’s just what they currently use.
I think we’re only a few years out before Google uses it’s gmail monopoly to forcefully change email.
I use all of them for different groups and conversations, and my experience so far is that none of these is obviously or significantly better than another for most text/image-based group or one-on-one messaging unless you have specific niche needs.
Whats the biggest downside to having all the data? You are responsible for it.
Google, Twitter and Facebook, store and link to data and are therefor responsible for all kinds of things, like keeping porn away from kids, securing data, dealing with privacy, verifying age, dealing with local laws, managing the needs of rights holders, moderating discussions, deciding if Donald trump should be banned or not and so on, all while paying big $ to store all this crap. They are put in an impossible position that is taking a big tole on all of them, and may even give them so many political enemies that they get broken up.
A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.
> A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.
I agree, and I'd love to see Our Decentralized Future happen -- though I worry that 'smart designer' might end up implying one of the following in practice:
(a) smart enough to stick to a design so limited, in terms of P2P communication, that it'll not be a threat to current Killer Apps.
(b) smart, to the point of omniscience, regarding what a judge may decide is the designer's problem.
>A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.
This doesn't sidestep the core problem of curation, though. It depends on the nature of the application, but just looking at ones that involve displaying user-submitted publicly: if you don't have a frontend with some manner of filtering and moderation, the app will quickly be overwhelmed with a flood of spam and illicit activity (ranging from copyright infringement to child abuse).
Things like IPFS work great for decentralized content storage if you don't need to provide any sort of curation or frontend. But if you do, you'll quickly find yourself running what reduces to a centralized platform. Or if you're providing a federated service of some kind, then your users will be the ones who find themselves in that situation.
Centralization is key to imparting knowledge, establishing law and order, and securing our existence through terraforming the planet on an immense scale — which is what separates humans from animals.
Scott Alexander uses the example of the US interstate highway system to defend the type of “centralization” which has been so crucial in humanity’s increasing standard of living [1]:
> I like Seeing Like A State as much as anyone else (though see the caveats in Part VII of my review for some criticisms). But it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:
> 3. The interstate highway system: 1950s army bureaucrats with a Prussia fetish decided America needed its own equivalent of the Reichsautobahn. The federal government came up with a Robert-Moses-like plan to spend $114 billion over several decades to build a rectangular grid of numbered giant roads all up and down the country, literally paving over whatever was there before, all according to pre-agreed federal standards. The public had so little say in the process that they started hundreds of freeway revolts trying to organize to prevent freeways from being built through their cities; the government crushed these when it could, and relocated the freeways to less politically influential areas when it couldn't.
Put simply, centralization is in our DNA. It is fundamentally how humans have become the planet’s most fearsome apex predator. Nature is very fearsome, of course, but the power to shape nature via concentrating power into the hands of the most capable in a meritocratic fashion is even moreso.
It’s not surprising centralized services dominate their decentralized counterparts. Bitcoin, however, is interesting here because the S&P is actually down since 1970 as measured in gold [2] — rather astonishing, given the S&P tracks some of the most powerful (centralized) human organizations in existence. It appears despite our best efforts, sometimes elements which exist outside of our political and legal grip can outperform even the greatest man-made feats.
Satoshi Nakamoto used clever cryptography to replicate a precious metal in digital form, as an attempt to pull humans away from centralized government monies. That was 2009, though, and people have since gotten too caught up in the glittery financial rewards aspect of Bitcoin to appreciate it on this level.
> Bringing fresh competition against Chrome isn’t really an option either. Modern browser rendering engines are so complex (especially when you have to implement all of Chrome’s undocumented quirks too), that even Microsoft gave up trying. And if you’re thinking of making your own system that eschews the web standards, good luck trying to bootstrap the entire web’s worth of content
The Gemini protocol is getting there. I recommend Lagrange [3]. Drew Devault hosts some of his blog articles on Gemini.
there is a big difference between the interstate highway system and centralized internet applications. the interstate highway system was built by the government (by the people, for the people) and everyone can use it with their own vehicles, and provide services on them for others. so while building the interstate highway itself was centralized, it actually provides the infrastructure for decentralized applications.
conversely, centralized internet applications are not infrastructure for other decentralized applications but they only exist for themselves.
i don't know if the internet highway should be considered centralized (as the backbone is in the hands of a few big players) but the use of that highway is certainly decentralized. the question is rather, can we have a federated bus system, where independent companies integrate their bus timetables so you can conveniently transfer from one to the other, or is greyhound dominating the whole network, refusing to cooperate with competitors?
> No, the solution has to be political. That’s uncomfortable for me, as it probably is for you too. Software I can do, politics though? That’s hard.
I've been noodling this point from the political end for academic reasons of late.
Conclusion: society is an 80/20 problem.
- 80% geared toward stability (why I want actual companies with heft doing things like bridges and hardware &c). Socialized things.
- 20% geared toward innovation. Risk taking. Capitalism. Experimentation of the "Hold my beer" variety.
The tension between these two cannot and should not be resolved; rather, graciously supported.
I submit that TFA makes the point that the 80% bullies the 20% a bit too much. Government's role is arguably to be an honest referee, except that the 80% tends to have the loot in addition to the numbers.
I'd like to rally more around the FSF to do more to preserve and protect open culture. Takes leadership, business chops, and patience.
The 80 per cent also includes the large rent seeking corporations. It is in their interest to stifle innovation as well, or if not, then be in a privileged position to aquire it once it has been de-risked.
After posting I realized you had effectively said the same thing. To your point about government acting as a referee to ensure the free market is operating effectively, I don't see that happening unless the electorate demands an end to all activities that could lead to regulatory capture. I'm not sure if this is ever possible..
I disagree that such a political solution == socialism.
Every time some piece of infrastructure became critically important for the society, people used political power to regulate the companies providing the infrastructure. Happened with railroads, water and sewers, electricity distribution.
The modern big tech with it's social networks is very similar to these older networks.
If tech were an industry that required no regulation at all, then it would really be the only such industry. The fact that regulation is necessary should be entirely unsurprising.
All major countries have discovered that extensive regulatory regimes are necessary to keep the free market in check. It isn't at all unusual that, as the article states, tech would require similar regulations to promote fairness, openness, and competition.
Counterthesis: decentralised applications are losing popularity because XMPP was so awful that it poisoned the view of decentralisation. Pre-XMPP everything was decentralised and federated. Post-XMPP decentralisation became synonymous with less-good clones of centralised systems, and both new systems and existing decentralised systems started moving towards centralisation. Decentralisation will come back again when the best systems are decentralised.
Most ordinary users have no idea. But there's a cultural generation of developers who tried to use Jabber in their high school / college years, found out how much it sucked, and carried that experience consciously or unconsciously into their programming careers.
Sure, but that isn't important in any way. Programmers have much less influence on business decisions that that, and practically none on the society at large. If it was so good we'd be using it now.
XMPP was created to provide an open alternative to the proprietary instant messaging systems that popped up in the mid 1990s, but wasn't usable until several years after several of those had gained significant popularity. I suspect the number of people who tried XMPP and rejected it in favor of something proprietary is tiny in comparison to those who never heard of it.
IM may be the first category where an internet application first appeared in a modern, user-friendly, full-featured form in a proprietary implementation before there was a standardized implementation.
If anyone wanna try out XMPP, Conversations is a good client for android, available on fdroid. Dino is a good Linux client. IMO dismail and trashserver seem to be good public servers, if you don't wanna host yourself [1][2].
This is… an interesting take. You mean that everything before the 1999 XMPP PoC was decentralized, and XMPP killed it? (despite the actual situation at the time being split between closed and centralized networks, like MSN, ICQ, etc). And XMPP is to blame for the failure of all the other decentralized systems (that have nothing in common) that came between then and now?
Additionally, considering several hundred million people use XMPP on a daily basis (and even more use something that started out based on XMPP, e.g. whatsapp), saying that XMPP is so terrible that it killed everything is so weird that it would need some facts to back it up.
> This is… an interesting take. You mean that everything before the 1999 XMPP PoC was decentralized, and XMPP killed it? (despite the actual situation at the time being split between closed and centralized networks, like MSN, ICQ, etc). And XMPP is to blame for the failure of all the other decentralized systems (that have nothing in common) that came between then and now?
I mean that instant messaging was the first time (on the internet, at least) that centralized networks beat decentralised networks (whereas centralised competitors to email, the web, etc. had lost), and the legacy of that is why many subsequent network systems (that indeed have very little in common) have been built as centralised rather than decentralised. And I've gradually reached the conclusion that the reason the centralised networks won that one was not because they were uniquely good, but that XMPP was uniquely bad.
> Additionally, considering several hundred million people use XMPP on a daily basis (and even more use something that started out based on XMPP, e.g. whatsapp), saying that XMPP is so terrible that it killed everything is so weird that it would need some facts to back it up.
Actually I see the fact that modified forks of XMPP have been so much more successful than mainline XMPP as a demonstration that XMPP's design makes a lot of unforced errors.
I largely nodded along with the post, I think it raised a lot of valid issues about the state of non-profit software
Yet, I think one big reason why non-profit solutions are so unpopular is not primarily about marking, but about the terrible, truly terrible UX that most non-profit projects have.
As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers.
Element is a laggy Discord clone. Signal is years behind other messengers in terms of features and general UI quality, Thunderbird is stock in the early 2000s, same as VLC, and I don't know a lot of serious artists that are using GIMP.
So, even though this is surely not the only reason why open source projects are not widely used, I think it's a huge contributing factor.
There are shining example s though, like Blender, Godot or Mastodon, that are truly open source and have a great set of features paired with nice UX and I don't think they're doing too badly :)
What's wrong with VLC or Thunderbird? Nothing, they got replaced by online services which provide storage/content and not just the UI (usually the UI feature set of online services is actually inferior).
> As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers.
Discord, for example, has 450 full-time employees and is valued at $7 billion. I simply don't see how small non-profit teams, many of which are run primarily by volunteer labor, can compete with that in terms of UX. How many full-time designers or UX folks are working on GIMP or VLC?
Which UX is good can be a matter of opinion, some people may prefer different programs. I use a IRC client which doesn't do a lot more than display raw IRC protocol messages with syntax highlighting and a few other things (such as shortcuts, macros, filters, auto-pong, etc), and I think it is better than any web chat that I have seen (profit or not), but I am strange, anyways. But, I am the kind of guy who use Heirloom-mailx for email (one thing it has is the ability to write an attachment to a pipe; most modern programs only support files and not pipes; a lot my own software is designed to import from and export to pipes instead of files, since I think that is more useful), who want to read the RFC before using the internet, and who learned Magic: the Gathering by reading the entire Comprehensive Rules before starting the game, and disliking USB, and preferring Plain TeX instead of LaTeX; which I think are the kind of things that most people hate. So, it is a matter of opinion, I suppose.
It seems to be a lot of more modern programs seem to have worse UX, in my opinion (part of the problem is lack of documentation, too); not whether or not it is profit. At least in my experience, profit makes many things worse because they try to be mass-marketing and more trying to earn money, rather than being first the quality of the product. And also, they put too many fancy animations and stuff.
> What GitHub does though, is rather more sinister. They tweak the actual development workflow away from email with features like pull requests, and and they lock project data in with features like their issue system.
1) when my project gets PRs, how do I hear about this most of the time? Yep, email
2) Nothing is forcing anyone to use github as their canonical repo. For my project, our canonical repo is self-hosted, and we use hooks to mirror to github. This lets people familiar with github use their tools and workflow, but avoids us being particularly tied into the github way.
> avoids us being particularly tied into the github way.
Github and git are very different things, which is often forgotten. Github centralizes ever more functionality that is in any way related to the entirety of the software development process.
Want to set up a popular open source project hosted on your own code forge? Good luck, without the network effects of github your task is way harder.
Regulation is presented as one possible solution, with a footnote expressing some uncertainty about that path. I just wanted to add that I think the economics plans laid out by Richard Wolff can do a lot to better align the motives of firms to the motives of the people. Wolff is prolific online so I will not try to argue his case, but I do believe that essentially “make a sizable portion of the economy comprised of worker managed cooperatives” actually would tend to solve some of the problems related to centralization in an open market. Wolff does not generally advocate for government based solutions except for possible legislation that would make it easier for cooperatives to thrive.
Overall too much time spent on the rant for me. To paraphrase: “true” crypto has a long way to go and some large companies have dominated otherwise successful decentralized systems. Yes, no doubt. The last section is the interesting discussion that needs having.
The hypothesis is: capitalism is a hostile environment for user centric (non-abusive) software. I think I tend to agree (despite also believing that as an industry we could do a lot better job of pushing licenses that protect user freedom and help isolate users from abuse back against the domineering capitalists that simply don't understand how software ecosystems work).
I don’t think the author sufficiently defended their hypothesis. I didn't see any discussion about how and why profit motives are misaligned. The piece is missing evidence that supports the jump from “look some big companies have dominated decentralized systems” to “capitalism creates profit motives that must yield the results we’ve seen”. How are we sure the same result wouldn't happen under other economic systems, for example? Thats’s not a defense of capitalism on my part, just a desire to explore this topic much deeper.
Maybe software needs to be designed to resist domination? Or maybe the ability to be dominated has made certain applications successful? Maybe we shouldn't run some software for profit? Maybe we simply need to make it illegal to use persistent identity information in internet-scale applications and data sets beyond authentication and security purposes? Maybe our browsers aren't doing enough to present an “opt in on every use” type of experience for users (I wonder why)?
I do agree there’s an uncomfortable political element to the discussion.
Don't judge the author too harshly. Ingrid presents an overall perspective of the entire field. Yes, some definitions are somewhat skewed, but I'm sure many people see things the same way. In a way, the fact the author wrote the article and we're all reading all these comments, is because we all care about this and we want to see a truly distributed web succeed. So it's ok to try to reason how we get there.
In all honestly, I've had very similar thoughts. As someone who started with BITNET before the Internet, I always believed "the Net" was supposed to level the field, and we no longer have to be "consumers" but rather willing participants capable of innovation, on our own right. I know, how naive.
Where I disagree is in the solution. It's not political. Whenever you think about the Internet, you MUST think global. I've had the chance to visit around 35 countries, and I've seen first hand how governments don't work for people, for the most part.
It comes down to this: we (geeks and nerds) need to get out of our comfort zone and think in terms of user experience. We CAN create amazing things. But we must think about the people using these solutions. People use Dropbox because it's easy, not because it's good. Same for Gmail and other services. If we are not creating solutions that can be used by anyone, in an easy and straightforward fashion, we're not doing our job. If companies don't see value in what we are creating when it could help them tremendously (i.e. IPFS) then WE are doing something wrong.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadAll I can gather is the author once worked in blockchain and is now burnt out by the monetary side.
Everything they describe such as Git and email work fine. A strong technology will have SaS offerings but also still be usable from a CLI perspective.
Article title is click bait.
Which may be true, but i didn't find the evidence presented particularly compelling, and the structure of the argument was confusing.
Most people don't matter and yeah, they 'll always prefer the prepackaged, "curated", high sugar content. The role of the decentralized web is to provide an infinite-frontier alternative so that ideas can grow outside the pettiness and the boxes of the mainstream. And yes, they do work for that
I think that the "abusive relationship with platforms like Medium, Twitter, and Instagram" is mostly psychological.
BitTorrent is used in a lot of settings for data distribution and for software distribution. Saying it's just for pirating reveals the author's laziness. Several of these use-cases are listed in the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
As for crypto, I recommend people read about Bitcoin being used for the purposes of sending remittances to start.
You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.
So while it could be done, the question is really "should it be done"? I'd love to be able to send a file over the internet easily without using some centralized service, but if there's only 2 people that are meant to have the file, does the overhead of BitTorrent make any sense?
It's not the same as bittorrent proper.
For 1-to-1 transfers, Magic Wormhole is the system to beat, and I struggle to imagine how it could be improved.
https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william
This means its not a self-sovereign system, like Bittorrent, GIT, and Bitcoin. Its no different then a central Napster server, the one that got dragged into court on November 1999. Scientists are still working on creating self-sovereign peer-to-peer systems. Its hard, but we're going to solve it in coming years.
Scientific community: "International Workshop series on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good", https://dicg2020.github.io/ (disclaimer: involved scientist)
https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william
Windows binary: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william/releases/downlo...
There's GUI: https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui
Android app too: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william-mobile
The author is on HN as psanford
I haven't seen any regular user use a separate download tool or a download manager for a decade or more.
Except for BitTorrent clients, but those aren't targeted at 1:1, of course :-)
How it's being used is a different problem, but it's certainly effective and popular.
Blizzard has been using it for years: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader
This company is new and is using it as a CDN: https://www.peer5.com/
Bittorrent is everywhere, just like Linux, and you mostly don't notice it.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...
I followed your recommendation and this is what I found: bitcoin might, in theory, work for the purpose of sending remittances, but in practice it doesn't.
So, returning to the original question, can cryptocurrencies offer an innovative solution for migrant remittances to developing countries? Yes and no. In theory, cryptocurrencies can really provide an effective and economical channel for money transfers to help alleviate poverty through remittances. However, there are two principle problems. Firstly, coins such as Bitcoin remain too volatile, in fact ten times more volatile than major currencies (Baur & Dimpfl 2021). This means that if migrants were to use such channel they would be exposing themselves to extreme risks. But, more importantly users of bitcoin may find themselves victims of speculative attacks, as the cryptocurrencies’ value remains completely speculatively constructed. Secondly, as with international bank transfers, cryptocurrencies need a bank account to buy and sell it. As explained above, having a bank account is not a given and represents a high barrier to entry for many of the poorest migrants.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/humanrights/2021/04/29/cryptocurrenc...
BitTorrent is great but I wouldn’t exactly call it mainstream. I do wish more sites used it for downloads though.
I haven’t sat down and researched this, but an argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts?
The world wide web (the author complains DNS is too hard...well you dont technically need a domain name)
Usenet (was mainstream back in the day)
IRC is semi-federated, kind of obscure now, but was a bigger deal back in the day.
The author dismisses email, but that seems like an obvious answer.
DNS (hierarchical distribution. Depends how you define distributed i suppose) - what's more mainstream than that?
If for some reason you don't want to use Google's platform, you're 100% free of creating your own mail server. The crazy thing is that it will probably work out just fine. The mail client/server model is really popular. You can go ahead and DIY your email and use all the popular clients without issue (maybe except Gmail? idk).
And sure, if you somehow become famous in a way Google doesn't like, they can effectively cut you off from lots of other people by not federating with your email server. In practice, though, this is probably pretty uncommon.
www
A lot of large companies also run their own servers, consumers can use icloud, protonmail, yahoo,... or the one from their ISP.
The argument in the article is that GMail controls email. It is definitely not true. Email is still how people do business, and business email is not owned by Google.
A lot of older networked games were, probably some modern ones too. One player hosts the game (either picked automatically by the match making system, or by running a game server listed by a index server), and everyone else connects to them. Call of duty, counter strike, starcraft, etc.
As other people mentioned the internet, also texting and telephones, but the peers in this example are really big. I think some of the bank transfer stuff is also a "distributed" system with big peers.
FireChat (distributed chat over wifi) was reasonably mainstream in Hong Kong for awhile: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/firechat-off-the-grid-messag...
People have mentioned email and the Web as examples; I'd also throw in podcasts. (None of these are "apps," per se, but they're all examples from the article, so.)
> An argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts?
Yes. :)
The article makes the point, in so many words, that a lot of decentralized services end up dominated by a small number of major players. I think this is hard to argue with; yes, there are other service providers competing with the big ones, but that doesn't disprove the point. The most recent figures I can find suggest that Gmail had 43% of the email "market" in 2020; that's not more than everyone else combined, but number two is Yahoo (!) at 26%, with third place Outlook (i.e., the email service Microsoft keeps changing the name of, not the client application) trailing at 6%. Many people who might have been bloggers a bit over a decade ago use Medium or, more likely, just Twitter. (I think Twitter did far more to kill the blog than the death of Google Reader, but that's a different topic.) We can go on.
Where I think the article gets it wrong isn't in its description of the problem, it's in its diagnosis. Partially. I think the author is right in saying that better tooling isn't the problem, but wrong in saying that the profit motive is in "ensuring decentrialized systems fail." The profit motive is, to borrow your apt phrase, in making centralized systems trusted, available, and resilient. GitHub, Google Workspace, and Slack took over as much of the business world as they did because they're not only easier to set up than doing it yourself, they gain the benefits of a tremendous userbase: they're highly available and resilient, they're well-understood, they have lots of integration plugins.
I'd love to see more decentralized/federated systems succeed, but many of them aren't just fiddly and quirky, they're proudly fiddly and quirky. If they're going to take off, we may need to focus less on where we think companies behind centralized services are deviously undermining their decentralized relatives, and focus more on why those services succeeded in the first place.
Not necessarily. They will still need an open protocol, good documentation, etc. And even then, it may not be suitable for what you are doing (and yet, they try to use it anyways). Furthermore, it won't necessarily always be available; you cannot predict some things that will go wrong with it. And, you cannot really trust them for sure either, necessarily.
To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. You can buy a domain and use Proton, Fastmail, or any other provider to have your own email. If you become unhappy with them, it's easy to move. We have open specs that allow every service to interoperate, so you don't need to know or care what provider your recipient is using.
Whether or not its possible for one party to dominate the network is one of the potential properties of a "distributed" system that people cannot agree on if its required in the definition.
For example, napster, TOR and IRC are arguably "distributed" systems where there is a central party that controls the network.
IRC is a distributed system much like a CDN is distributed, that is spread across the network.
what we are actually interested in is distributed ownership.
email is that, as is the web, but IRC is not
Nonetheless, that doesn't make it any less of a problem that the definitions are severely overloaded. The issue is not that the article is unclear in its definitions (even though it is imo), the issue is that its hard to have discussions about the topic and compare to other articles, because people talk past each other. Words having agreed meanings is important so we can connect ideas to a broader context and not just talk about individual articles in isolation.
distributed ownership, aka federation does not require trust between operators as each operator is trusted only to manage their own servers without being able to control entities that originate from other servers
https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=distributed+application
Email is (at the server level) a peer to peer network, only tied to DNS/BGP as the only central points, with a global namespace. That can't be said for a lot of open standards.
I don't like cryptocurrencies (those who are unbacked and resource hungry, I like the tech behind) but bringing payments in the software world and out of financial gatekeepers could exactly the missing piece of the puzzle to have even more working decentralised apps.
Recognising this doesn't help with criticising capitalism, I guess.
So the author seems to take "decentralized" here to mean "fully decentralized and peer-to-peer", which is indeed an unconventionally strong definition. But later on, they mention IRC, which is centralized by any definition... Actually, the author doesn't seem to be working from a strong definition at all and they seem to have given this very shallow thought and research.
"To clarify what I mean by decentralised: applications whose main purpose is fulfilled as part of a network, where that network is not reliant on any preordained nodes. Decentralised applications are also known as “federated”. There is also a more specific term “distributed”, also known as “peer to peer”. I won’t cover the distinction with the more specific terms because it’s not relevant here. I use the word application in a looser sense, to also cover protocols and specifications."
Even so, IRC has no business in this list per the authors definition.
The "network" part is arguable, but IRC does not require any pre-ordained nodes, which matches the author's definition.
It's a small part of full decentralization, but an important one. Being able to point your Facebook Messenger client at a different server would be a big step.
Interestingly, you used to be able to do the inverse: point your XMPP client at Facebook Messenger. I'm pretty sure they never supported federation, but you could connect clients to multiple servers and have a relatively seamless experience from a single client.
I must correct you here on "Protocols like Mastodon". The protocol that underlies the Fediverse is the W3C ActivityPub Recommendation [0] and making that distinction is really important. Not doing so would encourage centralization in the same ways as discussed elsewhere in this thread for Email vs. Gmail.
Mastodon is just a fediverse app that was an early adopter of ActivityPub, and managed to become quite popular. Part of this due to a better productization, and the jumpstart this gave them offering the best features first. To many newcomers Fediverse === Mastodon, but - while understandable - this is massively shortselling the interop capabilities of the protocol.
What has already happened by Mastodon dominance is that they are driving the technological direction, but not necessarily in the best possible way and to the overall benefit of the Fediverse. They have a custom client API for instance that is becoming a de-facto standard, adopted by others out of convenience.
[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
More details here: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-t...
I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of a decentralised application.
Email and the web are decentralised applications. But they are not the email and the web of the 1990s, when their decentralisation was the killer feature that saw them beat out centralised networks. To try and live on a non-Google/non-Facebook web is like using Linux on the desktop in 2000: it's certainly possible, but it's a bit of a hairshirt.
Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could never do on their own server and those who could would be spending a lot of time training the blocker which those using Google never even needed to think of.
No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com
Except for, oh, I don't know, maybe https://mail.com/ ?
the implementation however was much better than hotmail or any other web-based email at the time.
To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.
gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations. Hotmail and yahoo mail sounded like idiotic kid email addresses. Webmail never tried doing email. Pobox.com did only forwarding and was too linked to the physical mail in the mind of people. Same went for mailboxes.com.
> To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.
Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).
yes, to us (the techies), but there are billions of people in the world who didn't know who or what gmail was for a at least 4-5 years. I specifically made the observation of geemail sounding like email because I had that experienced less than a decade ago giving the address to a dentist's secretary in Denmark.
>Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).
first of all I'd say Google had a great product and ok marketing for a few years, nowadays they have great marketing, an ok product, and built in market dominance.
So I suppose I can accept that good marketing is a prerequisite but not sufficient.
That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.
And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?
I would say you have to look at the alternative names - hotmail? yahoo.com? gmail sounds like a fantastic choice.
> That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.
Your target customers know who you are.
> And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?
Random people are not customers of Thomson Reuters and Thompson Reuters is not in a market of converting them. Those that consume news content as a part of their product know who Thompson Reuters is.
I guess if that is the requirement I would say adequate marketing is required to succeed.
A slightly more problematic is targeted phishing attacks, where the attackers try to put at least some work-relevant information “. Some of those attempts are not so trivial. I do receive them few times per year, while with GMail I do not remember getting one in at least a year. But on other hand I am not so sure that Google will defend against those if we have used GMail at work.
I'm sure most normal people could install SpamAssassin and configure it to use community blacklists on their Dovecot/Postfix server. It's not that hard.
Google somehow wants to force me to not use my email server. Fuck them
It you don't have dmarc enabled that is for sure worth doing too.
It does mean your traffic is centralized through a data center, but it probably goes through one already...
Also you're incredibly alienated if you think a "normal person" could manage their own mailserver. 95%+ of western people couldn't use a CLI.
I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.
I think that’s “especially as”. Other mail providers are competition, after all.
Everyone else had to up their game due to Gmail. On all fronts.
Obviously a personal anecdote, but I signed up for Gmail close to when it first came out, and I don't think I've ever had a legitimate piece of mail marked as spam.
I remember people clamoring to sign up for Gmail because it was the new thing, it had the counter that kept going up with "a lot" of storage space, etc. Folks were even paying others for a Gmail invite.
meanwhile tons of spam (crypto related) is marked as spam, without that it'd be pain enter my mailbox
This, definitely. Take a look at gmail spam folder, it's always full of false positives.
Public organizational emails in orgs I've been a part of (e.g. admin@example.com, community@example.com) get a little more spam, largely sales pitches from what appears to be actual humans at shady SEO companies. Maybe 2 a week.
I get way more "legitimate" corporate spam than actual unprompted/cold spam. The most egregious example in recent memory was when I made an online purchase at Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and made sure the "sign me up for the email list" checkbox was not selected. They sent me no fewer than four emails asking if I would like to sign up for their email list, including one titled, "Thanks for signing up for our email list!" (inside: "Just take this one last step to confirm your subscription <signup link>").
In conclusion, I perceive unwanted email to be largely a self-inflicted problem at present. For example, someone I know likes to complain about the quantity of email she receives, but also refuses to unsubscribe, because sometimes she sees something interesting in one of the many promotional lists she's on. I also don't understand people who say they're not bothered by advertising, but to each her own.
> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good
How can these two sentences be true at the same time?
Spam filtering is very hard. Therefore there are some content based rules and some sender based rules. Google is very good at both of those, which means in this context means accuracy and precision based on content and strictness based on sender. Sender based rules make it hard for spammers to send mail pretending to be from a domain, but does make it harder for anyone to send mail. Hosting your own mail server means hosting the authorization architecture to prove you're not a spammer, which makes it harder.
I wish this meme could die. gmail spam filtering isn't particularly good, it never has been. They crank up the false positive rate high enough that the spam in your inbox is about comparable to other solutions, but at the expense of tons of false positives.
I've had a gmail account since the launch. Been there got the tshirt (literally.. have a tshirt of the launch when they were bragging about 1GB storage). I've also been managing email servers and mailing lists since the very early 90s to today.
Notice every site that interacts with email has the ubiquitous warning abot "check your spam folder"? Not solely, but largely a legacy of so many users on gmail getting used to so much legitimate email going to spam. it doesn't have to be that way.
You can easily to an order of magnitude better on fewer false positives while still getting less spam overall in your inbox, by running your own email servers.
I haven't had a false positive in ... certainly many years on my own email on my servers. And a bit less spam getting through than on the gmail account.
> Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.
gmail has a big false positive problem, yes, but it isn't any worse for you as a sender if you run your own email servers. I experience more false positives emailing from work account to work account (both sides hosted by gmail) than from personal account (hosted by me) to gmail.
> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well
Spam filtering is actually not hard anymore. I've been running email servers and mailing lists from before spam existed, through its rise and later fall. There was a time, ca.2000, when it was hard. Because nearly every legitimate email server was misconfigured, so one had to allow it all through, but most was spam. So it took a lot of client side filtering.
These days, very easy. Legitimate senders are well configured, so just reject all misconfigured clients at the SMTP connection. There, that's 95%+ of spam blocked. The few remaining items are easily filtered by whichever bayesian filter you like. I'm using spamprobe. Done. No spam. No false positives.
It is not about centralization but about one player winning and beating the competition in that case.
Her actual conclusion is that in order to create a market whose average members are free, we need more regulation.
In the olden days, any business could say in good faith "I want to offer email services" and they would have been treated pretty much the same as any other good faith provider of email service. But today, a business who wanted to start up an email service is insane; just check out the nearby thread of a person who replaced Mailchimp with a semi-self-rolled service. As a matter of fact, no matter what the RFCs say, people in the industry do not treat email as decentralised.
This is partially because people joined the network in bad faith, but it's also because a small number of large nodes are able to assume anyone who isn't known to them is acting in bad faith and therefore force people towards the larger nodes.
As I said before, email and the web continue to be usable in a decentralised fashion, but to do so involves wearing a hairshirt. This is the failure of decentralised applications. The author of the article has a view that is closer to "the market is only as free as its weaker members" rather than the view more fashionable hereabouts "the market is only as free as its stronger members", which leads to a different conclusion. It would probably lead to more insightful disagreements to discuss this underlying difference rather than arguing about what technologies email is less centralised than. (Edit to clairfy: These things in quotation marks are not quotes. The quotation marks are used to help delimit the propositions.)
I'm confused, because it seems like you agree with the author. She says
>> My statement that email can be used without involving Google is technically true, but anyone they blacklist will quickly realise that they’re largely locked out of the global email network.
She is stating that the problem with email isn't that it is an open network, but that it is effectively centralized by a few big players. It might as well be a centralized service. The protocol may be open but if you aren't using a major centralized service you're going to experience a lot more difficulty, including potentially being black listed by these big players. Just getting accidentally classified as spam on one of them and you will locked out. Not to mention dealing with all the spam if you roll your own.
> If you become unhappy with them, it's easy to move.
I think this is an absurd statement and you know it or you are lying to yourself. Sure, forwarding exists but that's not exactly moving. If you've ever tried moving email addresses you'd know how difficult this is. It's significantly harder than moving phone numbers, which also isn't that easy. Just think of every account that you now need to modify. Sure, you don't need to port every account, but there's more than you probably think.
My current provider started getting flaky when they were bought out by a larger one, but I've been putting it off for years trying to move. Maybe offlineimap to a local box, probably best to have your own backup anyway.
Conversely, in the blockchain space anyone can participate in the blockchain. If a miner refuses to mine your transactions, that's profit that another miner can pick up. And if worst comes to worst, you can set up your own mining infrastructure and mine that transaction yourself - if the system is working correctly, you never need permission from someone else at all to participate. (there are some assumptions here, and if you choose to reject those assumptions as valid you can reasonably claim that blockchains aren't decentralized either)
But, yes, that doesn't mean you have to run your own node. However, it should include the possibility to do so.
i can't see how i would host my own mail server with my domain, but then send emails from that domain via someone else.
the only way i could see that working is to use the ISP/other service as a relay to forward my mails.
In life, nothing is perfect. For example, I can't use a CPU based on an open ISA as my daily driver. Does that mean that CPUs "don't work"? Of course not.
The fact that something is used for illegal purposes means that it doesn't work? Does LSD "not work"?
The fact that something is hard to set up or maintain mean that it doesn't work? Does Linux not work? Do airplanes not work?
Does the fact that something is an environmental disaster mean that it doesn't work? Do cars not work? Do highways not work?
When I write in more "narrative" tone, it's hard for me to make sure that my grammar is right, and that I'm making myself understood.
In fact, I always try to write my comments in narrative form first, but many times the grammar comes out awkward, so I scrap that and write in a more dialogical form.
If you have any recommendations on how to improve this, they're welcome.
None of that is relevant to the people who use drug marketplaces or cars, but those are different people.
Imagine you came up with a technically superior version of email, and it functioned technically perfectly, but you were unable to convince anyone else to use it. Sure, it would "work" technically in a narrow functional sense, but it wouldn't "work" in terms of doing what it was actually designed to do. My taking LSD isn't really affected by other people doing so or not: it's a private thing. But my sending an email is: it's a network interaction.
The author's claim is correct in the sense that, if you hold a party and no-one comes, the party didn't really work.
They dominate because they're better for end users who don't mind giving up compatibility/freedom to implement their own client, which the vast majority of people don't want to do. Slack/Discord/WhatsApp are far better instant messaging/voice or video conferencing software than IRC.
I think we’re only a few years out before Google uses it’s gmail monopoly to forcefully change email.
I use all of them for different groups and conversations, and my experience so far is that none of these is obviously or significantly better than another for most text/image-based group or one-on-one messaging unless you have specific niche needs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_(given_name)
Google, Twitter and Facebook, store and link to data and are therefor responsible for all kinds of things, like keeping porn away from kids, securing data, dealing with privacy, verifying age, dealing with local laws, managing the needs of rights holders, moderating discussions, deciding if Donald trump should be banned or not and so on, all while paying big $ to store all this crap. They are put in an impossible position that is taking a big tole on all of them, and may even give them so many political enemies that they get broken up.
A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.
I agree, and I'd love to see Our Decentralized Future happen -- though I worry that 'smart designer' might end up implying one of the following in practice:
(a) smart enough to stick to a design so limited, in terms of P2P communication, that it'll not be a threat to current Killer Apps.
(b) smart, to the point of omniscience, regarding what a judge may decide is the designer's problem.
This doesn't sidestep the core problem of curation, though. It depends on the nature of the application, but just looking at ones that involve displaying user-submitted publicly: if you don't have a frontend with some manner of filtering and moderation, the app will quickly be overwhelmed with a flood of spam and illicit activity (ranging from copyright infringement to child abuse).
Things like IPFS work great for decentralized content storage if you don't need to provide any sort of curation or frontend. But if you do, you'll quickly find yourself running what reduces to a centralized platform. Or if you're providing a federated service of some kind, then your users will be the ones who find themselves in that situation.
Scott Alexander uses the example of the US interstate highway system to defend the type of “centralization” which has been so crucial in humanity’s increasing standard of living [1]:
> I like Seeing Like A State as much as anyone else (though see the caveats in Part VII of my review for some criticisms). But it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:
> 3. The interstate highway system: 1950s army bureaucrats with a Prussia fetish decided America needed its own equivalent of the Reichsautobahn. The federal government came up with a Robert-Moses-like plan to spend $114 billion over several decades to build a rectangular grid of numbered giant roads all up and down the country, literally paving over whatever was there before, all according to pre-agreed federal standards. The public had so little say in the process that they started hundreds of freeway revolts trying to organize to prevent freeways from being built through their cities; the government crushed these when it could, and relocated the freeways to less politically influential areas when it couldn't.
Put simply, centralization is in our DNA. It is fundamentally how humans have become the planet’s most fearsome apex predator. Nature is very fearsome, of course, but the power to shape nature via concentrating power into the hands of the most capable in a meritocratic fashion is even moreso.
It’s not surprising centralized services dominate their decentralized counterparts. Bitcoin, however, is interesting here because the S&P is actually down since 1970 as measured in gold [2] — rather astonishing, given the S&P tracks some of the most powerful (centralized) human organizations in existence. It appears despite our best efforts, sometimes elements which exist outside of our political and legal grip can outperform even the greatest man-made feats.
Satoshi Nakamoto used clever cryptography to replicate a precious metal in digital form, as an attempt to pull humans away from centralized government monies. That was 2009, though, and people have since gotten too caught up in the glittery financial rewards aspect of Bitcoin to appreciate it on this level.
> Bringing fresh competition against Chrome isn’t really an option either. Modern browser rendering engines are so complex (especially when you have to implement all of Chrome’s undocumented quirks too), that even Microsoft gave up trying. And if you’re thinking of making your own system that eschews the web standards, good luck trying to bootstrap the entire web’s worth of content
The Gemini protocol is getting there. I recommend Lagrange [3]. Drew Devault hosts some of his blog articles on Gemini.
[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-weyl-on-technoc...
[2]: http://pricedingold.com/sp-500/
[3]: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
conversely, centralized internet applications are not infrastructure for other decentralized applications but they only exist for themselves.
i don't know if the internet highway should be considered centralized (as the backbone is in the hands of a few big players) but the use of that highway is certainly decentralized. the question is rather, can we have a federated bus system, where independent companies integrate their bus timetables so you can conveniently transfer from one to the other, or is greyhound dominating the whole network, refusing to cooperate with competitors?
I've been noodling this point from the political end for academic reasons of late.
Conclusion: society is an 80/20 problem.
- 80% geared toward stability (why I want actual companies with heft doing things like bridges and hardware &c). Socialized things.
- 20% geared toward innovation. Risk taking. Capitalism. Experimentation of the "Hold my beer" variety.
The tension between these two cannot and should not be resolved; rather, graciously supported.
I submit that TFA makes the point that the 80% bullies the 20% a bit too much. Government's role is arguably to be an honest referee, except that the 80% tends to have the loot in addition to the numbers.
I'd like to rally more around the FSF to do more to preserve and protect open culture. Takes leadership, business chops, and patience.
This is something that requires eternal vigilance from voters.
Yeah. Right. Maybe.
Every time some piece of infrastructure became critically important for the society, people used political power to regulate the companies providing the infrastructure. Happened with railroads, water and sewers, electricity distribution.
The modern big tech with it's social networks is very similar to these older networks.
All major countries have discovered that extensive regulatory regimes are necessary to keep the free market in check. It isn't at all unusual that, as the article states, tech would require similar regulations to promote fairness, openness, and competition.
Even if there was it would be a minority opinion among a company's developers, and developers have very little to no say in business decisions anyway.
IM may be the first category where an internet application first appeared in a modern, user-friendly, full-featured form in a proprietary implementation before there was a standardized implementation.
[1] https://dismail.de/
[2] https://trashserver.net/en/
You're gonna hear some saying it's all oh so secure. But be aware of tradeoffs [3].
[3] https://infosec-handbook.eu/blog/xmpp-aitm/
Additionally, considering several hundred million people use XMPP on a daily basis (and even more use something that started out based on XMPP, e.g. whatsapp), saying that XMPP is so terrible that it killed everything is so weird that it would need some facts to back it up.
I mean that instant messaging was the first time (on the internet, at least) that centralized networks beat decentralised networks (whereas centralised competitors to email, the web, etc. had lost), and the legacy of that is why many subsequent network systems (that indeed have very little in common) have been built as centralised rather than decentralised. And I've gradually reached the conclusion that the reason the centralised networks won that one was not because they were uniquely good, but that XMPP was uniquely bad.
> Additionally, considering several hundred million people use XMPP on a daily basis (and even more use something that started out based on XMPP, e.g. whatsapp), saying that XMPP is so terrible that it killed everything is so weird that it would need some facts to back it up.
Actually I see the fact that modified forks of XMPP have been so much more successful than mainline XMPP as a demonstration that XMPP's design makes a lot of unforced errors.
Yet, I think one big reason why non-profit solutions are so unpopular is not primarily about marking, but about the terrible, truly terrible UX that most non-profit projects have.
As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers.
Element is a laggy Discord clone. Signal is years behind other messengers in terms of features and general UI quality, Thunderbird is stock in the early 2000s, same as VLC, and I don't know a lot of serious artists that are using GIMP.
So, even though this is surely not the only reason why open source projects are not widely used, I think it's a huge contributing factor.
There are shining example s though, like Blender, Godot or Mastodon, that are truly open source and have a great set of features paired with nice UX and I don't think they're doing too badly :)
Discord, for example, has 450 full-time employees and is valued at $7 billion. I simply don't see how small non-profit teams, many of which are run primarily by volunteer labor, can compete with that in terms of UX. How many full-time designers or UX folks are working on GIMP or VLC?
It seems to be a lot of more modern programs seem to have worse UX, in my opinion (part of the problem is lack of documentation, too); not whether or not it is profit. At least in my experience, profit makes many things worse because they try to be mass-marketing and more trying to earn money, rather than being first the quality of the product. And also, they put too many fancy animations and stuff.
1) when my project gets PRs, how do I hear about this most of the time? Yep, email
2) Nothing is forcing anyone to use github as their canonical repo. For my project, our canonical repo is self-hosted, and we use hooks to mirror to github. This lets people familiar with github use their tools and workflow, but avoids us being particularly tied into the github way.
Github and git are very different things, which is often forgotten. Github centralizes ever more functionality that is in any way related to the entirety of the software development process.
Want to set up a popular open source project hosted on your own code forge? Good luck, without the network effects of github your task is way harder.
Luckily there are movements towards decentralization and breaking of this domination with https://forgefed.peers.community and https://fedeproxy.eu
The hypothesis is: capitalism is a hostile environment for user centric (non-abusive) software. I think I tend to agree (despite also believing that as an industry we could do a lot better job of pushing licenses that protect user freedom and help isolate users from abuse back against the domineering capitalists that simply don't understand how software ecosystems work).
I don’t think the author sufficiently defended their hypothesis. I didn't see any discussion about how and why profit motives are misaligned. The piece is missing evidence that supports the jump from “look some big companies have dominated decentralized systems” to “capitalism creates profit motives that must yield the results we’ve seen”. How are we sure the same result wouldn't happen under other economic systems, for example? Thats’s not a defense of capitalism on my part, just a desire to explore this topic much deeper.
Maybe software needs to be designed to resist domination? Or maybe the ability to be dominated has made certain applications successful? Maybe we shouldn't run some software for profit? Maybe we simply need to make it illegal to use persistent identity information in internet-scale applications and data sets beyond authentication and security purposes? Maybe our browsers aren't doing enough to present an “opt in on every use” type of experience for users (I wonder why)?
I do agree there’s an uncomfortable political element to the discussion.
In all honestly, I've had very similar thoughts. As someone who started with BITNET before the Internet, I always believed "the Net" was supposed to level the field, and we no longer have to be "consumers" but rather willing participants capable of innovation, on our own right. I know, how naive.
Where I disagree is in the solution. It's not political. Whenever you think about the Internet, you MUST think global. I've had the chance to visit around 35 countries, and I've seen first hand how governments don't work for people, for the most part.
It comes down to this: we (geeks and nerds) need to get out of our comfort zone and think in terms of user experience. We CAN create amazing things. But we must think about the people using these solutions. People use Dropbox because it's easy, not because it's good. Same for Gmail and other services. If we are not creating solutions that can be used by anyone, in an easy and straightforward fashion, we're not doing our job. If companies don't see value in what we are creating when it could help them tremendously (i.e. IPFS) then WE are doing something wrong.
I think it all comes down to UX.