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Actually, the web is decentralized. Many people mess around with the terms here. Just today I wrote a short post defining decentralized, distributed and federat

Actually, the web is decentralized. Many people mess around with the terms here. Just today I wrote a short post defining decentralized, distributed and federated in another thread [1]. While I am completely pro decentralization (I run my own Nextcloud, XMPP and E-Mail server), I am not very fond of all those 'distributed' ideas. Many of them rely on encryption which might be safe to use today, but encryption has this anoying property becoming unsafe in the future. So puting my data encrypted to some distributed network doesn't feel right for me. The problem with the tech giants is that their products are so easy to start with that many consumers just use them because they don't see real alternatives. And quite frankly, often there are no equivalent alternatives, as the tech giants throw so much money at their products that very few other products have the same ease of use. I am not sure about a solution to this dilemma, but I hope that some day we will have more high quality, easy to use, federated services. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17695808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17695808

wslh 8y ago
There are different intepretations or definitions of what is decentralized. For example, Vitalik defines the concwpts in a different way https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...
mike_hearn 8y ago
I've been working on decentralised systems of one form or another for a long time. I think there are several ways forward. One way is to build high quality platforms. Part of why centralised apps tend to be more common than decentralised is that we have pretty good or at least well understood platforms for making centralised apps, but the platforms for making decentralised apps are obscure at best and largely non-existent. Another way is to narrow and repoint the focus a bit. People thinking about decentralisation tend to immediately gravitate to consumer applications. I've found it easier to get traction in the business-to-business space. Despite all the noise generated by the press consumers often don't really care about things like lockin or data privacy - the tech firms protect people's data well enough, and there isn't usually enough lockin to really worry outside of maybe smartphone operating systems. However businesses are often much more sensitive to these issues. Yes they will outsource and use centralised services too, but they're much more likely to care about things like confidentiality, privacy of their data/trade secrets, they sometimes have regulatory constraints that push them in the direction of decentralisation etc. So that's one reason why I'm working on Corda, which is a platform for p2p business. It tends to get described as a blockchain system and it's got a lot of tech inspired by Bitcoin but I see it more as a platform for building decentralised apps (or more accurately, apps where you can precisely distribute and control trust points in accordance with your needs). Better platforms are absolutely the way to go for consumer apps as well. Unfortunately building such platforms will probably involve sacrificing some sacred cows. For instance the web is a terribly centralising platform. It's great at decentralising information and documents but when (ab)used as a way to build ordinary applications it creates far more centralisation than we've ever seen before. To get decentralised apps becoming commonplace we probably need to tackle the dominance of HTML5 and HTTP as a (desktop/laptop) app platform.
brlewis 8y ago
tech giants throw so much money at their products that very few other products have the same ease of use If you have a typical-sized online service, I think you can be in the same league as the tech giants with two full-time employees focused on ease of use. With four I think you can be on equal footing. And if you charge users for your service, you can focus on ease-of-use improvements that let users get things done faster. A tech giant whose revenue increases with "engagement" is going to make few improvements that help people leave their site faster. EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about competing on ease of use, not feature count.

wslh 8y ago

There are different intepretations or definitions of what is decentralized. For example, Vitalik defines the concwpts in a different way https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...

mike_hearn 8y ago

I've been working on decentralised systems of one form or another for a long time. I think there are several ways forward. One way is to build high quality platforms. Part of why centralised apps tend to be more common than decentralised is that we have pretty good or at least well understood platforms for making centralised apps, but the platforms for making decentralised apps are obscure at best and largely non-existent. Another way is to narrow and repoint the focus a bit. People thinking about decentralisation tend to immediately gravitate to consumer applications. I've found it easier to get traction in the business-to-business space. Despite all the noise generated by the press consumers often don't really care about things like lockin or data privacy - the tech firms protect people's data well enough, and there isn't usually enough lockin to really worry outside of maybe smartphone operating systems. However businesses are often much more sensitive to these issues. Yes they will outsource and use centralised services too, but they're much more likely to care about things like confidentiality, privacy of their data/trade secrets, they sometimes have regulatory constraints that push them in the direction of decentralisation etc. So that's one reason why I'm working on Corda, which is a platform for p2p business. It tends to get described as a blockchain system and it's got a lot of tech inspired by Bitcoin but I see it more as a platform for building decentralised apps (or more accurately, apps where you can precisely distribute and control trust points in accordance with your needs). Better platforms are absolutely the way to go for consumer apps as well. Unfortunately building such platforms will probably involve sacrificing some sacred cows. For instance the web is a terribly centralising platform. It's great at decentralising information and documents but when (ab)used as a way to build ordinary applications it creates far more centralisation than we've ever seen before. To get decentralised apps becoming commonplace we probably need to tackle the dominance of HTML5 and HTTP as a (desktop/laptop) app platform.

brlewis 8y ago

tech giants throw so much money at their products that very few other products have the same ease of use If you have a typical-sized online service, I think you can be in the same league as the tech giants with two full-time employees focused on ease of use. With four I think you can be on equal footing. And if you charge users for your service, you can focus on ease-of-use improvements that let users get things done faster. A tech giant whose revenue increases with "engagement" is going to make few improvements that help people leave their site faster. EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about competing on ease of use, not feature count.