7 ms·

Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse th

by st26 8y ago

Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity. The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.

zzzcpan 8y ago
> Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization How so? Centralization is merely enforced by the government and incentivized by the system it exists in.
- danso 8y ago
  Many humans are social creatures and like to congregate.
- stupidcar 8y ago
  If centralisation only occurs due to government enforcement, then how did government itself come into existence? It's the purest example of centralisation, after all. There must be something that incentivised centralisation even in the absence of government.
apozem 8y ago
Ben Thompson at Stratechery has been banging the centralization drum for a while. His take is the sheer scale of the internet imbues tremendous value to any centralized service that can organize it (e.g. what Google does for web pages or Facebook does for your friends). If this is the case then the internet may end up more centralized than previous forms of media and communication. I hope that's wrong, but it seems to be happening right in front of us.
- diplocorp 8y ago
  So that's how Stratechery is spelled! I have been listening to Exponent for a while and failed to find the site on Google.
  - haldean 8y ago
    How is it meant to be said aloud? I've always wondered.
    - bklaasen 8y ago
      "struh-TEK-uh-ree".
      - MBCook 8y ago
        He created it to be “stra-tee-ka-ry” (after George W. Bush’s infamous ‘stragegery’) but no one ever pronounced it right. Over time, he admitted that “stra-tech-uh-ry” was better anyway because the site covers technology.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
brownbat 8y ago
Hmm, of those, if I could specify "pick one of these 20 DNS resolvers at random for each query" I might... Sorry, tangential thought, I agree with your main point, and the others are much tougher.
neckardt 8y ago
I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up. The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand. That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  I saw someone post on Twitter saying they were tired of being their own sysadmin. It's true - I could set up my own mail server, my own Git hosting etc etc, but why would I? I'd rather just pay Fastmail for email and GitHub for some private repos.
  - kennxl 8y ago
    Decentralized =! inconvenience
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Except that, 99% of the time, it does.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    For the same reason that you don't opt for a dictator even though it is more convenient than democracy (until it isn't, at which point there is little you can do about it). Also, you could also instead pay people to develop easier solutions for self-hosting. Or you could buy a service from a smaller hosting provider. There is more than the extremes of "google is email" and "I have to hand-carve my mail server".
Nition 8y ago
Maybe we can eventually achieve something like decentralized ownership of centralized web resources. While not quite decentralized ownership, Wikipedia is at least a non-profit that everyone contributes donations to. Where's the Wikipedia for code? Where's the non-profit donation-based social network?
jacques_chester 8y ago
> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves. In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it. For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
I think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms. There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed. Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact again if Facebook banned me or them. This isn't a new problem caused by Facebook though, in previous years there was the same problem with email, and before that, if someone changed their address or phone number you'd lose contact. There are actually people who I lost contact with who I regained contact through Facebook. Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. Git and Github are fine, at work we could switch to a self hosted solution or Bitbucket in a fairly trivial amount of time. Same for our work emails, we could switch form Gmail to another host with fairly minimal disruption. Centralisation with locked ecosystems, like Facebook, are not good.
- sbov 8y ago
  > But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed. You can loose control of your domain too. And if someone else snatches it up they could even read your newly incoming email. I'm willing to bet when gmail bans an account, they don't recycle it.
- rwoll 8y ago
  Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. I'd love to see GitHub (and GitLab) offer a custom domain name option which would proxy HTTPS and SSH clones via a company's custom domain (e.g. code.example.com) to GitHub's hosting. That way, if a company needs to move away from GitHub (or GitHub goes away), developer's references to some company's code is not stuck pointing to some stale github.com domain. Hosting such a proxy (and the repos) takes infrastructure, time, and experience to secure and make available, so from a user's perspective it's great if a company does this as a service as long as you provide the domain.
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
Fnoord 8y ago
> The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc. Eh, I have Gmail, but I barely use it. Regarding DNS, that's only because the DNS provided by ISPs is being tampered with or runs downright awful. What happens is people copy each other's behavior. X (friend of Y) starts using Facebook. Friend of X starts using Facebook as well. But X never looked into the alternatives (who has the time for that plus everyone is using Facebook); its only because of other people that they started using it. It is called the network effect [1] though we can thank the early adopters for feeding that hype. I see it as a sign of capitalism/optimization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

by st26 8y ago

zzzcpan 8y ago

> Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization How so? Centralization is merely enforced by the government and incentivized by the system it exists in.

danso 8y ago
Many humans are social creatures and like to congregate.
stupidcar 8y ago
If centralisation only occurs due to government enforcement, then how did government itself come into existence? It's the purest example of centralisation, after all. There must be something that incentivised centralisation even in the absence of government.

apozem 8y ago

Ben Thompson at Stratechery has been banging the centralization drum for a while. His take is the sheer scale of the internet imbues tremendous value to any centralized service that can organize it (e.g. what Google does for web pages or Facebook does for your friends). If this is the case then the internet may end up more centralized than previous forms of media and communication. I hope that's wrong, but it seems to be happening right in front of us.

diplocorp 8y ago
So that's how Stratechery is spelled! I have been listening to Exponent for a while and failed to find the site on Google.
- haldean 8y ago
  How is it meant to be said aloud? I've always wondered.
  - bklaasen 8y ago
    "struh-TEK-uh-ree".
    - MBCook 8y ago
      He created it to be “stra-tee-ka-ry” (after George W. Bush’s infamous ‘stragegery’) but no one ever pronounced it right. Over time, he admitted that “stra-tech-uh-ry” was better anyway because the site covers technology.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

brownbat 8y ago

Hmm, of those, if I could specify "pick one of these 20 DNS resolvers at random for each query" I might... Sorry, tangential thought, I agree with your main point, and the others are much tougher.

neckardt 8y ago

I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up. The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand. That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.

voltagex_ 8y ago
I saw someone post on Twitter saying they were tired of being their own sysadmin. It's true - I could set up my own mail server, my own Git hosting etc etc, but why would I? I'd rather just pay Fastmail for email and GitHub for some private repos.
- kennxl 8y ago
  Decentralized =! inconvenience
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Except that, 99% of the time, it does.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  For the same reason that you don't opt for a dictator even though it is more convenient than democracy (until it isn't, at which point there is little you can do about it). Also, you could also instead pay people to develop easier solutions for self-hosting. Or you could buy a service from a smaller hosting provider. There is more than the extremes of "google is email" and "I have to hand-carve my mail server".

Nition 8y ago

Maybe we can eventually achieve something like decentralized ownership of centralized web resources. While not quite decentralized ownership, Wikipedia is at least a non-profit that everyone contributes donations to. Where's the Wikipedia for code? Where's the non-profit donation-based social network?

jacques_chester 8y ago

> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves. In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it. For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

I think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms. There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed. Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact again if Facebook banned me or them. This isn't a new problem caused by Facebook though, in previous years there was the same problem with email, and before that, if someone changed their address or phone number you'd lose contact. There are actually people who I lost contact with who I regained contact through Facebook. Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. Git and Github are fine, at work we could switch to a self hosted solution or Bitbucket in a fairly trivial amount of time. Same for our work emails, we could switch form Gmail to another host with fairly minimal disruption. Centralisation with locked ecosystems, like Facebook, are not good.

sbov 8y ago
> But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed. You can loose control of your domain too. And if someone else snatches it up they could even read your newly incoming email. I'm willing to bet when gmail bans an account, they don't recycle it.
rwoll 8y ago
Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. I'd love to see GitHub (and GitLab) offer a custom domain name option which would proxy HTTPS and SSH clones via a company's custom domain (e.g. code.example.com) to GitHub's hosting. That way, if a company needs to move away from GitHub (or GitHub goes away), developer's references to some company's code is not stuck pointing to some stale github.com domain. Hosting such a proxy (and the repos) takes infrastructure, time, and experience to secure and make available, so from a user's perspective it's great if a company does this as a service as long as you provide the domain.
- voltagex_ 8y ago

Fnoord 8y ago

> The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc. Eh, I have Gmail, but I barely use it. Regarding DNS, that's only because the DNS provided by ISPs is being tampered with or runs downright awful. What happens is people copy each other's behavior. X (friend of Y) starts using Facebook. Friend of X starts using Facebook as well. But X never looked into the alternatives (who has the time for that plus everyone is using Facebook); its only because of other people that they started using it. It is called the network effect [1] though we can thank the early adopters for feeding that hype. I see it as a sign of capitalism/optimization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect