12 ms·

Centralized Wins. Decentralized Loses

275 points by ghosthamlet 8y ago

mark_l_watson 8y ago
I wish it weren’t true but for right now I agree with the author, including what it might take to tip the balance: “1. Complete deterioration of trust such that avoiding the centralization of power becomes a necessity. 4. The decentralization community manages to create clearly superior applications as convenient and reliable as centralized providers.“ I was eager to use GNU Social, and after some use for a year, my host shut down. I just opened another Mastadon account but haven’t started using it yet. Also, the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting people I follow. Social media is best when used as an advertising and directory service for content we put on our own blogs and web sites, but even that seems to be less common. I really enjoyed the Decentralized Web Conference June 2016, but it also made me slightly sad that fighting back against centralized web, political, corporate, etc. centralization is an uphill fight. Sometime network power laws suck.
- jasonkostempski 8y ago
  What about centralized but libre servers and clients, and run by the EFF and FSF? If they one day start behaving badly, we all migrate away to a new benevolent dictator. Or maybe EFF and FSF somehow legally bind themselves to not be able to behave badly, if that's possible. Maybe the domain name is owned by an impartial committee of some kind.
  - no1youknowz 8y ago
    > What about centralized but libre servers and clients, and run by the EFF and FSF I can't say much about the project right now. But something will land middle to late next year that has this in mind.
    - jasonkostempski 8y ago
      Intersting. But you can't say or won't say? Won't, fine by me. Can't, I'm already skeptical of anyone involved.
      - eximius 8y ago
        Don't forget "shouldn't"
      - no1youknowz 8y ago
        I can't because I'm really passionate about this and I'll end up going on a rant. :) But let me give you a glimpse of the scope involved. For a system to be completely free from censorship, it needs to have a moat around it: - Own Domain registrar - Independent Colo provider / Own infrastructure - Own Payment processor - Advertising networks / Own Ad Network for individuals - Content creators, that are free from brigading. - Company put into a trust, with a board of influential influencers abiding by an internet bill of rights. Currently no independent platform exists with the above and allows anyone irrespective of their voice or opinion to be heard and be supported by donation, merchandising sales or advertising revenue. You could say, they are green shoots in the form of d-tube, bitchute, steemit, but they are still very early in the process and do have a high surface area of attack. There's a lot wrong with the current system and I aim to fix that. >) Oh and I'm not at the beginning of the journey either. 3/4 of the 6 times I know how to implement. It's really all about making sure that it definitely is do-able and generates enough revenue year 1 to ensure it survives to year 3-5.
        mark_l_watson 8y ago
        That sounds good! Hopefully I will see the HN announcement when it is released.
        jasode 8y ago
        >For a system to be completely free from censorship, it needs to have a [moat (aka Own Ad Network)] around it: It looks like "free from censorship" and having an "ad network" are contradictory properties. If one invents an uncensored website e.g. "www.uncensorablecontent.com" -- that allows any content (including uncensorable child porn and uncensorable beheadings), advertisers like Pepsi and Toyota will avoid it. The site's freedom of speech ideals become radioactive to advertiser funding. Unless you're deliberately foregoing mainstream advertisers by intentional design. That's fine but that also means you're limited to niche advertisers which also means your content creators will have a smaller revenue pie to receive ad payments from. Those economics creates a feedback loop because the content creators making mainstream videos (e.g. harmless pop music videos or gardening tutorials) don't need the freedom properties of UncensorableContent.com and would just use a centralized site like Youtube because the mainstream advertisers are there and that's where the money is. Therefore, through the self-selection of certain content creators being restricted to outlets like UncensorableContent.com, it evolves to become a haven for unsavory content even if the architectural intention was to be a place for everybody's "good" content.
  - mark_l_watson 8y ago
    I didn’t see an easy way to move my quitter.no posts to my new Mastodon host.
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I just expanded a bit on my blog: http://markwatson.com/blog/2018/08/25/centralized-vs-distributed-systems-publishing-and-owning-our-own-content.html http://markwatson.com/blog/2018/08/25/centralized-vs-distrib...
- liotier 8y ago
  > the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting people I follow Same as that shitty club with overpriced beers... We go where the interesting people are and the bad ones kept under control.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    So anywhere but Twitter then.
- CM30 8y ago
  If a complete deterioration of trust is a prequisite for decentralisation winning, then I think it may be its time to shine soon enough. That's what's already behind all the social problems we're facing right now, like increasing polarisation and distrust of the media and the rise in fake news/resurgence of pseudoscience. Add to this people's current disdain for Facebook and Twitter, and the ingredients may be there for decentralised services in that sense. Whether the second part (the clearly superior applications as convenient and reliable as centralised providers) comes true is probably the main deciding factor about now.
nordsieck 8y ago
I think there are 2 issues at play here. The first one, the article touched on obliquely: > Back in those days of high adventure hosts were far more than mere pets, they were golden temples where crusaders came to worship speaking prayers of code. > > Today, servers aren't even cattle, servers are insects connected over fast networks. Centralization is not only possible now, it's economical, it's practical, ... "Back in those days" users were administrators of one sort or another because that was the barrier to entry. But administrating systems sucks, even if it's just a PC. The rise of server-less is just another testament to this: being able to outsource the boring, tricky bits to experts is great as long as the principle-agent problem doesn't rear its head too often. The second issue is that distributed (I suppose some people might call them federated) identity systems don't work very well. Look at the vast gulf between the spam problem on Facebook and the spam problem with email. If you've signed up with a centralized identity system, it's pretty convenient to use a bunch of services synced up with that identity: all of the social media stuff is probably the tip of the iceberg.
- api 8y ago
  This is a huge barrier to today's decentralized systems. I wanted to check out Mastodon and looked into setting up a node. It's a nightmare of rube goldberg machine dependency hell. It's not that I can't, but that I don't have time to mess with it. If decentralized system designers want these things to take off they must get better at writing clean code with a good UX. Start with a good UX for admins: single install, dependent on not much more than maybe a database or language runtime, easy upgrades, and good docs about how to get started. Then as the product matures work up to UX for end users. You will never get to the latter if you don't plan ahead a little and avoid design and runtime choices that drag in heaps of complexity or limit portability. Decentralized protocols are maturing, but UX is still awful. I think UX is half the problem. The other half the problem is defending against attacks. In today's world where computer networks and even simple services on them like discussion platforms can be targets for professional criminals and even national intelligence agencies, anything that gets popular will get seriously attacked. Centralized systems are far more straightforward to defend: block IPs, kick off users, update software in one place, etc. People like to hold up cryptocurrency as one system that has withstood constant attack, but that is only true if you limit scope to the protocol. As a holistic system cryptocurrency has been and continues to be successfully attacked with social engineering. Scammers are siphoning billions out of the cryptocurrency economy. On centralized economic systems like banks and exchanges you can ban, freeze funds, delist, and regulate.
dragonsh 8y ago
I think the main reason decentralization lost is not due to technology, but trust and network effect. Like we will deposit hard earned money in a bigger bank which has less chances of failure, even if internally it might not be safe and they will need our help to bail them out. More and more people deposit the money the bigger the bank. Like in real world we are responsible to support monopoly and large centralized companies, it's the same we did with internet and internet companies.
- nohnce 8y ago
  Also, convenience. Large number of branches and ATMs make it more accessible. Decentralized systems will have to be similarly convenient to get mainstream adoption initially.
- 18pfsmt 8y ago
  >reason decentralization lost Nothing has lost, the story is still evolving. Most people have only ever been on one social network: FB. People are now getting comfortable with Twitter, and Mastodon (or something like it) will eventually make more sense to the mainstream, non-technical audience.
  - dragonsh 8y ago
    You are right that some apps will become popular and they will become part of centralized backbone. People using Mastodon or any other decentralized apps based on Kadmelia DHT and other technology will still be using Android, ios, Mac or Windows as primary base platform. Only very small subset of people will use Linux. So in the end, it will still be dependent on centralized infrastructure. It's not just about one or two apps but the overall internet architecture and its control and dependence on bigger company. Now as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon lay their cables across oceans, acquire ISP's and telecom, will control from packet switching network to application delivery used by normal person.
nixpulvis 8y ago
in the energy world (power grids), there are very practical advantages to decentralized generation. It actually makes for a good example of similar pros/cons to the kind of (de)centralization this post is talking about.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
Peer-to-peer sharing in the 90s was the best example of decentralization that really worked, grew really quickly and had a massive user base. Napster was probably the most successful consumer decentralization software ever with something like 25M users in 2001. Sci-Hub, Torrent video sites etc... are very popular and those are all decentralized with torrents. So it's not that decentralization can't work, it's that legal structures won't allow it to work, because decentralization doesn't play nice with locking down IP.
- bfuller 8y ago
  >locking down ip that's the golden ticket right there. a meshnet is entirely possible RIGHT NOW but it would entirely destroy the idea of copyright and IP
- atomical 8y ago
  The examples you listed gained many users because they were (and are) sharing content that they do not own. Imagine peer to peer sharing of personal photos and videos by the users that own the copyright. The difference in outcome may be due to less economic incentive. It's easy to share photos on instagram and it's much more difficult to, say, download 20 academic papers without emptying one's bank account. There is a cost to the user to sharing photos with instagram. The cost hasn't been realized by the average user. https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/ https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    I disagree, I think it's because they let users access content easier and cheaper than the standard way. Music sharing is basically dead because of Spotify, Youtube Red etc... so they solved the simplicity problem, and the cost wasn't worth putting up with the problems of music torrents, which made decentralization benefits moot. There isn't any reason you couldn't make photo sharing decentralized as easy as instagram, but Instagram isn't photo sharing it's social networking, and decentralized social networking hasn't shown that it's easier/better than centralized.
mezzode 8y ago
Honestly, I think that decentralized networks are able to leverage advantages of centralization, like trust, while remaining decentralized enough to still have the advantages from that front too. GitHub and git are actually a good example of this, since you can use GitHub and know the platform is reliable, trustworthy, etc. but you can also use other hosts too. This degree of decentralization is at least better than fully centralized services like Twitter where you have zero interoperability at all. You can also see this in Mastodon too; the vast majority of users are on a handful of instances like mastodon.social anyway.
gumby 8y ago
What's often overlooked is that this same back-and-forth history predates computing. The greatest strengths of centralization typically turn out to be its weaknesses. The strength of well-designed decentralized systems is resiliency. But it's like multithreaded code; it's hard to write. Centralized systems trade off brittleness and kludges for a certain amount of predictability and the ability to actually hire programmers. As a result yes, you can run on multiple AWS sites, but you have to know too much to make that convenient. And other "benefits" (as the author points out those are two-edged) ("controlable, walled gardenable,defensible, brandable auditable, copyright checkable, GDPRable...") are also by design chokepoints. Its those chokepoints that make it brittle and that is where the weaknesses lie. Pre-computing: in the 1950s and 1960s there was a public debate as to whether the US government should be descentralized as a way of withstanding nuclear attack. Though we got the highway system, instead the US became more centralized, not less. And as a result it has contributed to more alienation of the populace from their representatives. I long thought California should spread its government around more for more public buy in and support (and for that matter knowledgable opposition). But of course everybody who cares about government wants to be "close to the seat of power", which we see particularly in the federal government.
- briancleland 8y ago
  It's a very old phenomenon indeed. Plato's Republic can be read as a meditation on the centralisation of power, the pros and cons of centralisation vs decentralisation, and how and why the balance shifts over time.
deleted 8y ago
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cryptica 8y ago
It will take a lot more time, but I think that decentralization will win in the end. Society could not operate without social contracts and those social contracts are founded on certain universally agreed upon principles of fairness. As the fairness of our economic system comes into question, more people feel justified in exploiting loopholes within social contracts; this causes social contracts to lose their integrity in the minds of people; which further exacerbates the problem/behavior. Eventually, there comes a point when most people are cheating the system; at that point, the system can no longer function and it collapses. Centralization creates an unfair economic environment because it limits the spread of economic opportunities. Most people already see centralization as a problem; as a source of injustice and inequality. Just as the process of acquiring private property (as a result of wealth accumulation) becomes increasingly unfair, social contracts founded on principles of ownership of private property are themselves becoming weaker.
- dnautics 8y ago
  there are situations where decentralization must win. You cannot, for example, have a centralized network between the Earth and Mars.
  - ghthor 8y ago
    I'd argue economics is a system that requires decentralization as well. Now with cryotocurrencies the burden required to get a seat at the table went from basically an impossible game of politics and expression of violence/dominance to a purely technical one. If I want to become a member of bitcoin I just need to start computing and now I'm a member with voting power. At an individual level this doesn't mean much, but at the geopolitical level this is a huge improvement. The future I see before us is our governments dropping the administrative burden of managing, minting, and distributing there own currencies and becoming a contributing member to the crypto computing platforms. If I was an up coming developing nation I'd be pouring money in into computer engineering to become a member of these global currency movments.
dustingetz 8y ago
7. Killer app
teleclimber 8y ago
The author claims winners and losers but doesn't talk about the criteria for winning and losing. Decentralized networks aren't after the same things as centralized ones. They're not after engagement metrics, ARPU, or stock valuation. If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the decentralized networks are far behind. But these things can change quickly after changing slowly. If decentralized networks cause big centralized ones to change their behavior in meaningful ways, for fear of losing users to the decentralized ones, then I would argue that's a win for decentralized networks. Small win, but still a win.
- freyr 8y ago
  > They're not after engagement metrics, ARPU, or stock valuation. You’re also not defining a winning criteria. What are they after? And who are the big winners?
  - teleclimber 8y ago
    > What are they after? Safety, freedom, control, privacy. > And who are the big winners? Nobody cares who the "big winners" are. That's the point.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Well, I care. I'd rather we had decentralized networks for social media, blogging, sharing, content distribution like video, etc. But we don't. I can start one of these up (or join one) where it's just me and a handful of other like-minded people in favor of decentralization, but it would defeat the purpose. I don't merely want a decentralized service, I want a STRONG decentralized service, with tons of nodes and tons of millions of users. Without that, the "safety, freedom, control, privacy" in today's decentralized services are irrelevant. Being able to do nothing much and having it be safe, totally controllable, and private, is nothing to write home about.
      - prophesi 8y ago
        I think we're getting there. I'm hoping one of the federation protocols becomes widely accepted & implemented, so that users from any social platform are able to communicate and cross-post to any other social platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network
austincheney 8y ago
The article is extremely light on substance. This issue can be more readily addressed with a simple list: Centralization pros: * security * ease of management * lower overhead in task delegation * maintenance simplicity * versioning * no distribution Centralization cons: * fixed resources * fixed configuration * fixed environment Looking at these lists centralization at first appears immediately superior. These lists is an illusion in that it accounts for concerns in the present, but it does not account for growth or future concerns. Decentralized systems can scale in ways centralized systems cannot. The fixed nature of a centralized system is also a huge limitation. Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer. While the computation power of super computers grows rapidly over time so too does the computation power of your average home computer. There is also an economic qualifier for distribution too. Computational resources cost money in both hardware and electricity. When computational tasks are distributed so too are the expenses of computation. There is also a security/availability benefit to distributed systems. Centralized systems are a single point of failure. Distributed systems, at least in the public space, are diverse in their hardware and software which allows the system immunization from many forms of attacks. A centralized system can be isolated from the world by a DDOS attack, but it is substantially hard to attack a distributed system in this way.
- wslh 8y ago
  You missed one of the most important points about centralization: performance and legal aspects/governance. Could you sue IPFS if the protocol removed your files? You can against companies like Google. Not saying that centralization is always the best options, just adding more food for thought.
  - 18pfsmt 8y ago
    Obviously, you know one cannot sue a protocol or TheFappening torrent would not be available. That seems to be a strength: censorship resistance. But, it does have its downsides.
jerguismi 8y ago
"That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977), TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999)." Yeah, no one uses TCP/IP, DNS or SMTP nowadays. Good thing that we have gotted rid of those antiquated protocols and instead can use facebook and whatsapp! </sarcasm>
- coldtea 8y ago
  Why the sarcasm? It's true that (almost) no one uses them. Or, rather, no one much cares about them, and when they do use them, it's proxied and controlled by big corporate players. SMTP is email -- and people (outside of business email) all the more commonly use social networks for their communication. And even when they use email, a huge percentage of it is through Gmail. Heck, intra-gmail user emails don't even need (and maybe already don't) use SMTP/POP/IMAP at all, and that's a heck of a big percentage of today's email use. DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user experience). Ditto for TCP/IP. The fact that these protocols lark behind what we do at the higher level is irrelevant, when the abstractions we've built totally hide them, in ways that they didn't in the 80s and 90s. Here's some food for thought: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
  - GTP 8y ago
    A corporation could replace TCP with some proprietary protocol (but I don't see why would some even think about it) but can't replace IP: IP is the protocol that routers on the internet use to know how to route packets, you can't replace it without implementing the new protocol on all the routers that your packets have to go through and those routers aren't own by a single company, so TCP/IP isn't going anywere soon and probably would never go away.
  - 8y ago
zby 8y ago
Decentralized is good for experimenting, testing all the possibilities in parallel. Once we have a working model - and one with network effects - the play is about squeezing the last bites of efficiency and that is better done centralized.
Mc91 8y ago
Watching the Internet develop since the 1980s, this leaves a lot of stuff out. Yes, decentralized protocols like NNTP are not around like they used to be. The reason for this is because Usenet was effectively crushed by the US government. Many net luminaries, scientists, mathematicians, journalists, artists etc. were users of Usenet. In the 1990s and on, the Baby Bell monopolies used their monopoly powers to crush ISP competition. Then in 2008 Andrew Cuomo strongarmed the remaining monopoly telcos in New York to shut down Usenet saying "This literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than keeping our children safe". Obviously you can't say you want to crush decentralization in order to take power away from the individual and place it in the hands of corporate monopolies and the government, so you have to hear from the RIAA/MPAA about how artists are being ripped off (although many artists say the RIAA and MPAA are the ripoffs), or about terrorism, or the "think of the children" stuff from this case. > "it's controlable, it's governable, ..., it's walled gardenable,..., it's brandable, it's ownable, ..., it's auditable, it's copyright checkable, ..., it's safe for China searchable,..., it's monitorable" Well this is correct. Now we can be more controlled, more governed, more owned, more copyright checked, more monitored - these are all the benefits for them as they remove our decentralized communications. As the tendency toward recentralization seems to be in the US, a broader metric is the ratio of US GDP to world GDP, i.e. centralization of the world economy. This ratio has been falling since World War II - each year the US economy becomes less and less significant. So while network control is being centralized in the US, economic control in the world is becoming decentralized.
- krrrh 8y ago
  The point about Cuomo is definitely worth remembering, but USENET suffered its own decline. The vast majority of folks who got online from the mid-nineties on never learned how to use it or engaged with it in any fashion. Once the center of gravity shifted to web-based forums, and then social media, the older users mostly abandoned it. The lack of comprehensive solutions for spam in the mid-90s should also not be discounted. Spam is an easier problem for centralized systems to fix.
  - ghthor 8y ago
    I'd argue that its now even easier to combat spam using decentralization technologies. If you gateway all actions prone to spam with a signed transaction to a smart contract platform, where that execution costs the spammer real value for each action the spammer no longer has a unequal advantage. This means as an app developer I can mostly ignore combatting spam, that's now an infrastructure problem that the transaction miners need to deal with and handle. It's an empowering separation of concerns! Web 3.0 really shaping up to be a revolutionary development in humanities technology progress and modeling of the world around us.
rossdavidh 8y ago
Centralized vs. decentralized is a pendulum that has been swinging since time immemorial. Heck one could argue that cooperateive single-celled vs. multicellular organisms boils down to a similar principle. Given that this pendulum has been swinging back and forth since long before humans, and certainly throughout human history, I believe it is safe to say that neither is going to "win in the end". They each must obviously contain the seeds of their own downfall. Which is interesting and worthy of study, but I don't see this article particularly advancing the understanding of that.
honorious 8y ago
I would argue that abuse protection has been one of the main drivers toward centralized systems. Many goals of fully decentralized morality-neutral platforms are in conflict with the expectations of people to be protected from harm while using the internet. Centralized platforms get closed to providing such a protection (even if flawed). There is tons of research in decentralized methods for protecting against abuse (huge research topic in the 2000), yet not much has really worked (Bitcoin solves SOME, but it still suffers of many other abuse problems). Small-scale federated solutions (where all participants know each other) are potentially better on that front, but I don't think they will be profoundly different from solutions where control is centralized. There will need to be coordination in response to problems, hard to see how different parts of the system might implement profoundly different policies about content, anonymity without splitting the group. So, my conclusion is that solutions with centralized control are dominating the market not because a few evil corporations are conspiring to steal the control away from the free people, but because they DO provide a much safer environment for regular people to do regular things, despite all downside.
- DenisM 8y ago
  Email is a working example of federated network, and it’s profoundly different from Facebook. And not any more abusive than Twitter.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    Twitter is pretty abusive. And email used to be even worse. It didn't get decent until it people started flocking toward centralized solutions like GMail, which (coincidentally or not) did a pretty decent job of reining in spam and viruses.
    - syshum 8y ago
      The industry got good at that, Google is not a magical spam filter in fact in some ways it is not even really that great at all. There are many many ways to achieve the same or better results for spam protection they by using google
pjkundert 8y ago
I suggest looking at the Holochain project. https://developer.holochain.org https://developer.holochain.org It’s operational today (prototype stage), and solves many of the problems that have prevented the roll-out of distributed systems in the past. Useful right now, and moving fast toward alpha stage, with high scalability. This is going to have shocking effects in many fields where decentralized solutions have previously been difficult to scale.
leowoo91 8y ago
Email is decentralized, works great.
- pjkundert 8y ago
  Unfortunately we’ve lost most of the great parts, due to the fact they were easy to attack and hard to defend... It’s not really practical to run your own mail server anymore. This is from someone who’s been running a triply redundant MTA for over a decade. Works great — but I couldn’t describe to someone how to do it, without telling them in the next breath not to bother. Also, sending email was trivial and totally decentralized (any script could do it manually in a few lines of code), but that no longer works; now an authenticated connection back to a centralized industrial-scale sender is required. Easy, just not distributed anymore. The next gen, however, is going to be totally decentralized, and end-to-end authenticated and encrypted. Very exciting times: https://developer.holochain.org https://developer.holochain.org
deleted 8y ago
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AJ007 8y ago
It is worth pointing out that the "winning" centralized systems are largely built using decentralized systems. A lesson to start ups is to be very careful building your product by assembling pieces of commercial centralized systems. Make sure if one part goes up in smoke (Facebook deprecates an API, the App store bans you, Google Cloud API pricing quadruples, etc.) you can easily swap in out for something else. Another thing to consider is that centralized systems die. When support ends, but users are still there, software systems may decentralize. Take a look at "dead" MMOs that are still live because someone wrote a server emulator. Or, out of date DOS games which can be run in high resolution on a modern GPU because someone bothered to release the source code.
infinity0 8y ago
The author includes an incorrect diagram swapping around the definitions of distributed vs decentralised, then ignores that one of the design criteria of the internet was to survive against nuclear attack. Google's 40 centralised global datacenters wouldn't stand up very well to that sort of thing. Centralisation only works when nobody stronger is around to compete with.
- j2kun 8y ago
  You don't think Google could survive losing a single data center? Cloud users might lose some data, sure, and it'd likely cause issues, but I bet search wouldn't go down.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    Well, for one, many of their services (especially Hangouts) would become either impractical or illegal (w.r.t. data handling law) for a considerable number of people to use.
  - infinity0 8y ago
    You think the world only has 1 nuke? Also it looks like 40 was an overestimate by me, the real number is 15: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...
vegas 8y ago
This article presents absolutely nothing as regards an actual argument about how to write computer programs. That's enough to say about it.
noobermin 8y ago
Stop saying people don't care. (you can imagine me putting clap emojis between those like a cringy twitter poster). A majority of people supported net neutrality but the powers that be voted against it. The reality is of course people care if they know or have time to learn about systems, they just have no agency or power to effect change.
- deleted 8y ago
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- Negitivefrags 8y ago
  People cared about “Net Neutrality” because the name has a “free speech” ring to it, even though that isn’t really anything to do with that. How could anyone against the internet being neutral? I think “decentralised” isn’t going to drum up any interest unless you can couch it in the terms of a movement that people already understand and can be certain that it’s something the “good guys” would definitely want.
ilaksh 8y ago
What I think will happen is that we will see a different type of decentralization become popular. Common platforms are needed or convenient. Right now these platforms are generally controlled by large companies with something approaching monopolies in various markets. For example, Amazon provides services and a destination that help people sell things. The problem is Amazon is a company that also sells things and is trying to maximize profits. So vendors are competing with the company running their vending platform. Uber provides a platform for people to make money with their cars and to get around. It has the large network that drivers and riders need. But they are also so dominant that there is very little competition and so they can price things unfairly. My belief is that A) we do need common platforms but B) the monopoly platforms are unfair and C) decentralized technologies can provide common platforms that aren't controlled by monopolies. So what I think would make sense would be for drivers or even self-driving car companies to use decentralized protocols to make one large network and platform. That platform is open source and decentralized and used by many competing companies that want to provide transportation services. This allows companies access to a large pool of drivers and riders and a core technology implementation, but does not relinquish control to one company, so we can preserve competition and fairness.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  We will eventually get to a point where everybody is publishing content over arcane but decentralized protocols that may or may not be supported by their ISPs, or with content easily easily discoverable otherwise. It will take the emergence of aggregators and archivers to find and package access to this content in a convenient form while also filtering out the spam. When that happens, it will be 1996 again, and we'll be sharing stuff over NNTP and reading it through entities like dejanews. It was a solid plan. A lot of old Usenet content is still around, which is more than can be said about content shared on privately-owned forums or Facebook.
nicodjimenez 8y ago
An inconvenient truth in the golden age of crypto mania. Even crypto itself cannot put up a good fight against centralization, as companies like Bitmain and Coinbase dominate the landscape. Decentralized protocols and centralized services on top of those protocols is the future.
tranchms 8y ago
Why don’t we create network systems that model real social networks? Can’t we combine centralization and decentralization? Must it be all one or the other?
gcmartinelli 8y ago
there's a relevant gap in his 'history of the internet' analysis where centralized web was basically all that existed for users (i.e. AOL walled gardens). as many things in society, these internet trends seem to follow cycles of discovery/innovation and improvement/cost-efficiency. and the same way the previous centralized web crumbled with the appearance of novel services, so will the current centralized networks. trust in innovation.
arisAlexis 8y ago
isn't the author aware that Kardashian is into Bitcoin and publicly announced it?
erikpukinskis 8y ago
It's the wrong year to pick winners and losers. There's a huge amount of stress in the system right now. The coming quakes will drastically reshape the landscape. Let's check in around 2030 and see if centralized is still winning.
poisonborz 8y ago
I don'think it would be too hard to sell decentralized, even in general terms. You can buy a tomato in a supermarket, most people do so. Yet a large amount of people buy it from farmers on markets, also a lot grow it themselves. Everybody prefers local, homegrown tomato over supermarket one, always, even if that is cheaper, controlled and easier to get, everyone understands the differences, even while knowing nothing about how to grow a tomato. Such differences would also be increasingly trivial for apps and data we use daily. Customization, inherent in every individual, would also be a powerful driving force. Why letting FB/Google etc at our data requires also less and less explanation.
jvanderbot 8y ago
Maybe this blog can survive on a single server answering direct calls from modems, but last time I checked, decentralization of content delivery was the rule, not the exception. Centralized content with decentralized systems won. And they're doing so well it all appears centralized.
simonjgreen 8y ago
I may be feeling a touch pedantic, perhaps I just live in a different world being on the ISP side, but the Internet is not centralised at all. Large quantities of traffic ends up going to certain central locations, but the network itself is decidedly decentralised. Just look at LINX for example and the other major IXs, nobody there is telling everyone else where to send their packets, they just go where needed. In fact LINX as an organisation is a members organisation run by its members with each one, big or small, having one vote. IXs, BGP, RIRs like RIPE, and the proliferation around the globe of access ISPs, all prove how decentralised the Internet is. But if the point the article is trying to make is "all this content is being hosted in fewer and fewer locations and that's bad" then I completely agree. It damages choice and hugely increases the blast radius of service outages. Now if Amazon and Facebook started offering end user connectivity, that's the time to really worry. cough Google.
PoespasAR 8y ago
Its just the beginning of decentralized. These articles are so easy to write.

275 points by ghosthamlet 8y ago

I wish it weren’t true but for right now I agree with the author, including what it might take to tip the balance: “1. Complete deterioration of trust such that avoiding the centralization of power becomes a necessity. 4. The decentralization community manages to create clearly superior applications as convenient and reliable as centralized providers.“ I was eager to use GNU Social, and after some use for a year, my host shut down. I just opened another Mastadon account but haven’t started using it yet. Also, the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting people I follow. Social media is best when used as an advertising and directory service for content we put on our own blogs and web sites, but even that seems to be less common. I really enjoyed the Decentralized Web Conference June 2016, but it also made me slightly sad that fighting back against centralized web, political, corporate, etc. centralization is an uphill fight. Sometime network power laws suck.

jasonkostempski 8y ago
What about centralized but libre servers and clients, and run by the EFF and FSF? If they one day start behaving badly, we all migrate away to a new benevolent dictator. Or maybe EFF and FSF somehow legally bind themselves to not be able to behave badly, if that's possible. Maybe the domain name is owned by an impartial committee of some kind.
- no1youknowz 8y ago
  > What about centralized but libre servers and clients, and run by the EFF and FSF I can't say much about the project right now. But something will land middle to late next year that has this in mind.
  - jasonkostempski 8y ago
    Intersting. But you can't say or won't say? Won't, fine by me. Can't, I'm already skeptical of anyone involved.
    - eximius 8y ago
      Don't forget "shouldn't"
    - no1youknowz 8y ago
      I can't because I'm really passionate about this and I'll end up going on a rant. :) But let me give you a glimpse of the scope involved. For a system to be completely free from censorship, it needs to have a moat around it: - Own Domain registrar - Independent Colo provider / Own infrastructure - Own Payment processor - Advertising networks / Own Ad Network for individuals - Content creators, that are free from brigading. - Company put into a trust, with a board of influential influencers abiding by an internet bill of rights. Currently no independent platform exists with the above and allows anyone irrespective of their voice or opinion to be heard and be supported by donation, merchandising sales or advertising revenue. You could say, they are green shoots in the form of d-tube, bitchute, steemit, but they are still very early in the process and do have a high surface area of attack. There's a lot wrong with the current system and I aim to fix that. >) Oh and I'm not at the beginning of the journey either. 3/4 of the 6 times I know how to implement. It's really all about making sure that it definitely is do-able and generates enough revenue year 1 to ensure it survives to year 3-5.
      - mark_l_watson 8y ago
        That sounds good! Hopefully I will see the HN announcement when it is released.
      - jasode 8y ago
        >For a system to be completely free from censorship, it needs to have a [moat (aka Own Ad Network)] around it: It looks like "free from censorship" and having an "ad network" are contradictory properties. If one invents an uncensored website e.g. "www.uncensorablecontent.com" -- that allows any content (including uncensorable child porn and uncensorable beheadings), advertisers like Pepsi and Toyota will avoid it. The site's freedom of speech ideals become radioactive to advertiser funding. Unless you're deliberately foregoing mainstream advertisers by intentional design. That's fine but that also means you're limited to niche advertisers which also means your content creators will have a smaller revenue pie to receive ad payments from. Those economics creates a feedback loop because the content creators making mainstream videos (e.g. harmless pop music videos or gardening tutorials) don't need the freedom properties of UncensorableContent.com and would just use a centralized site like Youtube because the mainstream advertisers are there and that's where the money is. Therefore, through the self-selection of certain content creators being restricted to outlets like UncensorableContent.com, it evolves to become a haven for unsavory content even if the architectural intention was to be a place for everybody's "good" content.
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I didn’t see an easy way to move my quitter.no posts to my new Mastodon host.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
I just expanded a bit on my blog: http://markwatson.com/blog/2018/08/25/centralized-vs-distributed-systems-publishing-and-owning-our-own-content.html http://markwatson.com/blog/2018/08/25/centralized-vs-distrib...
liotier 8y ago
> the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting people I follow Same as that shitty club with overpriced beers... We go where the interesting people are and the bad ones kept under control.
- deleted 8y ago
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- egypturnash 8y ago
  So anywhere but Twitter then.
CM30 8y ago
If a complete deterioration of trust is a prequisite for decentralisation winning, then I think it may be its time to shine soon enough. That's what's already behind all the social problems we're facing right now, like increasing polarisation and distrust of the media and the rise in fake news/resurgence of pseudoscience. Add to this people's current disdain for Facebook and Twitter, and the ingredients may be there for decentralised services in that sense. Whether the second part (the clearly superior applications as convenient and reliable as centralised providers) comes true is probably the main deciding factor about now.

nordsieck 8y ago

I think there are 2 issues at play here. The first one, the article touched on obliquely: > Back in those days of high adventure hosts were far more than mere pets, they were golden temples where crusaders came to worship speaking prayers of code. > > Today, servers aren't even cattle, servers are insects connected over fast networks. Centralization is not only possible now, it's economical, it's practical, ... "Back in those days" users were administrators of one sort or another because that was the barrier to entry. But administrating systems sucks, even if it's just a PC. The rise of server-less is just another testament to this: being able to outsource the boring, tricky bits to experts is great as long as the principle-agent problem doesn't rear its head too often. The second issue is that distributed (I suppose some people might call them federated) identity systems don't work very well. Look at the vast gulf between the spam problem on Facebook and the spam problem with email. If you've signed up with a centralized identity system, it's pretty convenient to use a bunch of services synced up with that identity: all of the social media stuff is probably the tip of the iceberg.

api 8y ago
This is a huge barrier to today's decentralized systems. I wanted to check out Mastodon and looked into setting up a node. It's a nightmare of rube goldberg machine dependency hell. It's not that I can't, but that I don't have time to mess with it. If decentralized system designers want these things to take off they must get better at writing clean code with a good UX. Start with a good UX for admins: single install, dependent on not much more than maybe a database or language runtime, easy upgrades, and good docs about how to get started. Then as the product matures work up to UX for end users. You will never get to the latter if you don't plan ahead a little and avoid design and runtime choices that drag in heaps of complexity or limit portability. Decentralized protocols are maturing, but UX is still awful. I think UX is half the problem. The other half the problem is defending against attacks. In today's world where computer networks and even simple services on them like discussion platforms can be targets for professional criminals and even national intelligence agencies, anything that gets popular will get seriously attacked. Centralized systems are far more straightforward to defend: block IPs, kick off users, update software in one place, etc. People like to hold up cryptocurrency as one system that has withstood constant attack, but that is only true if you limit scope to the protocol. As a holistic system cryptocurrency has been and continues to be successfully attacked with social engineering. Scammers are siphoning billions out of the cryptocurrency economy. On centralized economic systems like banks and exchanges you can ban, freeze funds, delist, and regulate.

dragonsh 8y ago

I think the main reason decentralization lost is not due to technology, but trust and network effect. Like we will deposit hard earned money in a bigger bank which has less chances of failure, even if internally it might not be safe and they will need our help to bail them out. More and more people deposit the money the bigger the bank. Like in real world we are responsible to support monopoly and large centralized companies, it's the same we did with internet and internet companies.

nohnce 8y ago
Also, convenience. Large number of branches and ATMs make it more accessible. Decentralized systems will have to be similarly convenient to get mainstream adoption initially.
18pfsmt 8y ago
>reason decentralization lost Nothing has lost, the story is still evolving. Most people have only ever been on one social network: FB. People are now getting comfortable with Twitter, and Mastodon (or something like it) will eventually make more sense to the mainstream, non-technical audience.
- dragonsh 8y ago
  You are right that some apps will become popular and they will become part of centralized backbone. People using Mastodon or any other decentralized apps based on Kadmelia DHT and other technology will still be using Android, ios, Mac or Windows as primary base platform. Only very small subset of people will use Linux. So in the end, it will still be dependent on centralized infrastructure. It's not just about one or two apps but the overall internet architecture and its control and dependence on bigger company. Now as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon lay their cables across oceans, acquire ISP's and telecom, will control from packet switching network to application delivery used by normal person.

nixpulvis 8y ago

in the energy world (power grids), there are very practical advantages to decentralized generation. It actually makes for a good example of similar pros/cons to the kind of (de)centralization this post is talking about.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

Peer-to-peer sharing in the 90s was the best example of decentralization that really worked, grew really quickly and had a massive user base. Napster was probably the most successful consumer decentralization software ever with something like 25M users in 2001. Sci-Hub, Torrent video sites etc... are very popular and those are all decentralized with torrents. So it's not that decentralization can't work, it's that legal structures won't allow it to work, because decentralization doesn't play nice with locking down IP.

bfuller 8y ago
>locking down ip that's the golden ticket right there. a meshnet is entirely possible RIGHT NOW but it would entirely destroy the idea of copyright and IP
atomical 8y ago
The examples you listed gained many users because they were (and are) sharing content that they do not own. Imagine peer to peer sharing of personal photos and videos by the users that own the copyright. The difference in outcome may be due to less economic incentive. It's easy to share photos on instagram and it's much more difficult to, say, download 20 academic papers without emptying one's bank account. There is a cost to the user to sharing photos with instagram. The cost hasn't been realized by the average user. https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/ https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  I disagree, I think it's because they let users access content easier and cheaper than the standard way. Music sharing is basically dead because of Spotify, Youtube Red etc... so they solved the simplicity problem, and the cost wasn't worth putting up with the problems of music torrents, which made decentralization benefits moot. There isn't any reason you couldn't make photo sharing decentralized as easy as instagram, but Instagram isn't photo sharing it's social networking, and decentralized social networking hasn't shown that it's easier/better than centralized.

mezzode 8y ago

Honestly, I think that decentralized networks are able to leverage advantages of centralization, like trust, while remaining decentralized enough to still have the advantages from that front too. GitHub and git are actually a good example of this, since you can use GitHub and know the platform is reliable, trustworthy, etc. but you can also use other hosts too. This degree of decentralization is at least better than fully centralized services like Twitter where you have zero interoperability at all. You can also see this in Mastodon too; the vast majority of users are on a handful of instances like mastodon.social anyway.

gumby 8y ago

What's often overlooked is that this same back-and-forth history predates computing. The greatest strengths of centralization typically turn out to be its weaknesses. The strength of well-designed decentralized systems is resiliency. But it's like multithreaded code; it's hard to write. Centralized systems trade off brittleness and kludges for a certain amount of predictability and the ability to actually hire programmers. As a result yes, you can run on multiple AWS sites, but you have to know too much to make that convenient. And other "benefits" (as the author points out those are two-edged) ("controlable, walled gardenable,defensible, brandable auditable, copyright checkable, GDPRable...") are also by design chokepoints. Its those chokepoints that make it brittle and that is where the weaknesses lie. Pre-computing: in the 1950s and 1960s there was a public debate as to whether the US government should be descentralized as a way of withstanding nuclear attack. Though we got the highway system, instead the US became more centralized, not less. And as a result it has contributed to more alienation of the populace from their representatives. I long thought California should spread its government around more for more public buy in and support (and for that matter knowledgable opposition). But of course everybody who cares about government wants to be "close to the seat of power", which we see particularly in the federal government.

briancleland 8y ago
It's a very old phenomenon indeed. Plato's Republic can be read as a meditation on the centralisation of power, the pros and cons of centralisation vs decentralisation, and how and why the balance shifts over time.

deleted 8y ago

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cryptica 8y ago

It will take a lot more time, but I think that decentralization will win in the end. Society could not operate without social contracts and those social contracts are founded on certain universally agreed upon principles of fairness. As the fairness of our economic system comes into question, more people feel justified in exploiting loopholes within social contracts; this causes social contracts to lose their integrity in the minds of people; which further exacerbates the problem/behavior. Eventually, there comes a point when most people are cheating the system; at that point, the system can no longer function and it collapses. Centralization creates an unfair economic environment because it limits the spread of economic opportunities. Most people already see centralization as a problem; as a source of injustice and inequality. Just as the process of acquiring private property (as a result of wealth accumulation) becomes increasingly unfair, social contracts founded on principles of ownership of private property are themselves becoming weaker.

dnautics 8y ago
there are situations where decentralization must win. You cannot, for example, have a centralized network between the Earth and Mars.
- ghthor 8y ago
  I'd argue economics is a system that requires decentralization as well. Now with cryotocurrencies the burden required to get a seat at the table went from basically an impossible game of politics and expression of violence/dominance to a purely technical one. If I want to become a member of bitcoin I just need to start computing and now I'm a member with voting power. At an individual level this doesn't mean much, but at the geopolitical level this is a huge improvement. The future I see before us is our governments dropping the administrative burden of managing, minting, and distributing there own currencies and becoming a contributing member to the crypto computing platforms. If I was an up coming developing nation I'd be pouring money in into computer engineering to become a member of these global currency movments.

dustingetz 8y ago

7. Killer app

teleclimber 8y ago

The author claims winners and losers but doesn't talk about the criteria for winning and losing. Decentralized networks aren't after the same things as centralized ones. They're not after engagement metrics, ARPU, or stock valuation. If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the decentralized networks are far behind. But these things can change quickly after changing slowly. If decentralized networks cause big centralized ones to change their behavior in meaningful ways, for fear of losing users to the decentralized ones, then I would argue that's a win for decentralized networks. Small win, but still a win.

freyr 8y ago
> They're not after engagement metrics, ARPU, or stock valuation. You’re also not defining a winning criteria. What are they after? And who are the big winners?
- teleclimber 8y ago
  > What are they after? Safety, freedom, control, privacy. > And who are the big winners? Nobody cares who the "big winners" are. That's the point.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Well, I care. I'd rather we had decentralized networks for social media, blogging, sharing, content distribution like video, etc. But we don't. I can start one of these up (or join one) where it's just me and a handful of other like-minded people in favor of decentralization, but it would defeat the purpose. I don't merely want a decentralized service, I want a STRONG decentralized service, with tons of nodes and tons of millions of users. Without that, the "safety, freedom, control, privacy" in today's decentralized services are irrelevant. Being able to do nothing much and having it be safe, totally controllable, and private, is nothing to write home about.
    - prophesi 8y ago
      I think we're getting there. I'm hoping one of the federation protocols becomes widely accepted & implemented, so that users from any social platform are able to communicate and cross-post to any other social platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

austincheney 8y ago

The article is extremely light on substance. This issue can be more readily addressed with a simple list: Centralization pros: * security * ease of management * lower overhead in task delegation * maintenance simplicity * versioning * no distribution Centralization cons: * fixed resources * fixed configuration * fixed environment Looking at these lists centralization at first appears immediately superior. These lists is an illusion in that it accounts for concerns in the present, but it does not account for growth or future concerns. Decentralized systems can scale in ways centralized systems cannot. The fixed nature of a centralized system is also a huge limitation. Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer. While the computation power of super computers grows rapidly over time so too does the computation power of your average home computer. There is also an economic qualifier for distribution too. Computational resources cost money in both hardware and electricity. When computational tasks are distributed so too are the expenses of computation. There is also a security/availability benefit to distributed systems. Centralized systems are a single point of failure. Distributed systems, at least in the public space, are diverse in their hardware and software which allows the system immunization from many forms of attacks. A centralized system can be isolated from the world by a DDOS attack, but it is substantially hard to attack a distributed system in this way.

wslh 8y ago
You missed one of the most important points about centralization: performance and legal aspects/governance. Could you sue IPFS if the protocol removed your files? You can against companies like Google. Not saying that centralization is always the best options, just adding more food for thought.
- 18pfsmt 8y ago
  Obviously, you know one cannot sue a protocol or TheFappening torrent would not be available. That seems to be a strength: censorship resistance. But, it does have its downsides.

jerguismi 8y ago

"That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977), TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999)." Yeah, no one uses TCP/IP, DNS or SMTP nowadays. Good thing that we have gotted rid of those antiquated protocols and instead can use facebook and whatsapp! </sarcasm>

coldtea 8y ago
Why the sarcasm? It's true that (almost) no one uses them. Or, rather, no one much cares about them, and when they do use them, it's proxied and controlled by big corporate players. SMTP is email -- and people (outside of business email) all the more commonly use social networks for their communication. And even when they use email, a huge percentage of it is through Gmail. Heck, intra-gmail user emails don't even need (and maybe already don't) use SMTP/POP/IMAP at all, and that's a heck of a big percentage of today's email use. DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user experience). Ditto for TCP/IP. The fact that these protocols lark behind what we do at the higher level is irrelevant, when the abstractions we've built totally hide them, in ways that they didn't in the 80s and 90s. Here's some food for thought: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
- GTP 8y ago
  A corporation could replace TCP with some proprietary protocol (but I don't see why would some even think about it) but can't replace IP: IP is the protocol that routers on the internet use to know how to route packets, you can't replace it without implementing the new protocol on all the routers that your packets have to go through and those routers aren't own by a single company, so TCP/IP isn't going anywere soon and probably would never go away.
- 8y ago

zby 8y ago

Decentralized is good for experimenting, testing all the possibilities in parallel. Once we have a working model - and one with network effects - the play is about squeezing the last bites of efficiency and that is better done centralized.

Mc91 8y ago

Watching the Internet develop since the 1980s, this leaves a lot of stuff out. Yes, decentralized protocols like NNTP are not around like they used to be. The reason for this is because Usenet was effectively crushed by the US government. Many net luminaries, scientists, mathematicians, journalists, artists etc. were users of Usenet. In the 1990s and on, the Baby Bell monopolies used their monopoly powers to crush ISP competition. Then in 2008 Andrew Cuomo strongarmed the remaining monopoly telcos in New York to shut down Usenet saying "This literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than keeping our children safe". Obviously you can't say you want to crush decentralization in order to take power away from the individual and place it in the hands of corporate monopolies and the government, so you have to hear from the RIAA/MPAA about how artists are being ripped off (although many artists say the RIAA and MPAA are the ripoffs), or about terrorism, or the "think of the children" stuff from this case. > "it's controlable, it's governable, ..., it's walled gardenable,..., it's brandable, it's ownable, ..., it's auditable, it's copyright checkable, ..., it's safe for China searchable,..., it's monitorable" Well this is correct. Now we can be more controlled, more governed, more owned, more copyright checked, more monitored - these are all the benefits for them as they remove our decentralized communications. As the tendency toward recentralization seems to be in the US, a broader metric is the ratio of US GDP to world GDP, i.e. centralization of the world economy. This ratio has been falling since World War II - each year the US economy becomes less and less significant. So while network control is being centralized in the US, economic control in the world is becoming decentralized.

krrrh 8y ago
The point about Cuomo is definitely worth remembering, but USENET suffered its own decline. The vast majority of folks who got online from the mid-nineties on never learned how to use it or engaged with it in any fashion. Once the center of gravity shifted to web-based forums, and then social media, the older users mostly abandoned it. The lack of comprehensive solutions for spam in the mid-90s should also not be discounted. Spam is an easier problem for centralized systems to fix.
- ghthor 8y ago
  I'd argue that its now even easier to combat spam using decentralization technologies. If you gateway all actions prone to spam with a signed transaction to a smart contract platform, where that execution costs the spammer real value for each action the spammer no longer has a unequal advantage. This means as an app developer I can mostly ignore combatting spam, that's now an infrastructure problem that the transaction miners need to deal with and handle. It's an empowering separation of concerns! Web 3.0 really shaping up to be a revolutionary development in humanities technology progress and modeling of the world around us.

rossdavidh 8y ago

Centralized vs. decentralized is a pendulum that has been swinging since time immemorial. Heck one could argue that cooperateive single-celled vs. multicellular organisms boils down to a similar principle. Given that this pendulum has been swinging back and forth since long before humans, and certainly throughout human history, I believe it is safe to say that neither is going to "win in the end". They each must obviously contain the seeds of their own downfall. Which is interesting and worthy of study, but I don't see this article particularly advancing the understanding of that.

honorious 8y ago

I would argue that abuse protection has been one of the main drivers toward centralized systems. Many goals of fully decentralized morality-neutral platforms are in conflict with the expectations of people to be protected from harm while using the internet. Centralized platforms get closed to providing such a protection (even if flawed). There is tons of research in decentralized methods for protecting against abuse (huge research topic in the 2000), yet not much has really worked (Bitcoin solves SOME, but it still suffers of many other abuse problems). Small-scale federated solutions (where all participants know each other) are potentially better on that front, but I don't think they will be profoundly different from solutions where control is centralized. There will need to be coordination in response to problems, hard to see how different parts of the system might implement profoundly different policies about content, anonymity without splitting the group. So, my conclusion is that solutions with centralized control are dominating the market not because a few evil corporations are conspiring to steal the control away from the free people, but because they DO provide a much safer environment for regular people to do regular things, despite all downside.

DenisM 8y ago
Email is a working example of federated network, and it’s profoundly different from Facebook. And not any more abusive than Twitter.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Twitter is pretty abusive. And email used to be even worse. It didn't get decent until it people started flocking toward centralized solutions like GMail, which (coincidentally or not) did a pretty decent job of reining in spam and viruses.
  - syshum 8y ago
    The industry got good at that, Google is not a magical spam filter in fact in some ways it is not even really that great at all. There are many many ways to achieve the same or better results for spam protection they by using google

pjkundert 8y ago

I suggest looking at the Holochain project. https://developer.holochain.org https://developer.holochain.org It’s operational today (prototype stage), and solves many of the problems that have prevented the roll-out of distributed systems in the past. Useful right now, and moving fast toward alpha stage, with high scalability. This is going to have shocking effects in many fields where decentralized solutions have previously been difficult to scale.

leowoo91 8y ago

Email is decentralized, works great.

pjkundert 8y ago
Unfortunately we’ve lost most of the great parts, due to the fact they were easy to attack and hard to defend... It’s not really practical to run your own mail server anymore. This is from someone who’s been running a triply redundant MTA for over a decade. Works great — but I couldn’t describe to someone how to do it, without telling them in the next breath not to bother. Also, sending email was trivial and totally decentralized (any script could do it manually in a few lines of code), but that no longer works; now an authenticated connection back to a centralized industrial-scale sender is required. Easy, just not distributed anymore. The next gen, however, is going to be totally decentralized, and end-to-end authenticated and encrypted. Very exciting times: https://developer.holochain.org https://developer.holochain.org

deleted 8y ago

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AJ007 8y ago

It is worth pointing out that the "winning" centralized systems are largely built using decentralized systems. A lesson to start ups is to be very careful building your product by assembling pieces of commercial centralized systems. Make sure if one part goes up in smoke (Facebook deprecates an API, the App store bans you, Google Cloud API pricing quadruples, etc.) you can easily swap in out for something else. Another thing to consider is that centralized systems die. When support ends, but users are still there, software systems may decentralize. Take a look at "dead" MMOs that are still live because someone wrote a server emulator. Or, out of date DOS games which can be run in high resolution on a modern GPU because someone bothered to release the source code.

infinity0 8y ago

The author includes an incorrect diagram swapping around the definitions of distributed vs decentralised, then ignores that one of the design criteria of the internet was to survive against nuclear attack. Google's 40 centralised global datacenters wouldn't stand up very well to that sort of thing. Centralisation only works when nobody stronger is around to compete with.

j2kun 8y ago
You don't think Google could survive losing a single data center? Cloud users might lose some data, sure, and it'd likely cause issues, but I bet search wouldn't go down.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Well, for one, many of their services (especially Hangouts) would become either impractical or illegal (w.r.t. data handling law) for a considerable number of people to use.
- infinity0 8y ago
  You think the world only has 1 nuke? Also it looks like 40 was an overestimate by me, the real number is 15: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...

vegas 8y ago

This article presents absolutely nothing as regards an actual argument about how to write computer programs. That's enough to say about it.

noobermin 8y ago

Stop saying people don't care. (you can imagine me putting clap emojis between those like a cringy twitter poster). A majority of people supported net neutrality but the powers that be voted against it. The reality is of course people care if they know or have time to learn about systems, they just have no agency or power to effect change.

deleted 8y ago
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Negitivefrags 8y ago
People cared about “Net Neutrality” because the name has a “free speech” ring to it, even though that isn’t really anything to do with that. How could anyone against the internet being neutral? I think “decentralised” isn’t going to drum up any interest unless you can couch it in the terms of a movement that people already understand and can be certain that it’s something the “good guys” would definitely want.

ilaksh 8y ago

What I think will happen is that we will see a different type of decentralization become popular. Common platforms are needed or convenient. Right now these platforms are generally controlled by large companies with something approaching monopolies in various markets. For example, Amazon provides services and a destination that help people sell things. The problem is Amazon is a company that also sells things and is trying to maximize profits. So vendors are competing with the company running their vending platform. Uber provides a platform for people to make money with their cars and to get around. It has the large network that drivers and riders need. But they are also so dominant that there is very little competition and so they can price things unfairly. My belief is that A) we do need common platforms but B) the monopoly platforms are unfair and C) decentralized technologies can provide common platforms that aren't controlled by monopolies. So what I think would make sense would be for drivers or even self-driving car companies to use decentralized protocols to make one large network and platform. That platform is open source and decentralized and used by many competing companies that want to provide transportation services. This allows companies access to a large pool of drivers and riders and a core technology implementation, but does not relinquish control to one company, so we can preserve competition and fairness.

jstarfish 8y ago
We will eventually get to a point where everybody is publishing content over arcane but decentralized protocols that may or may not be supported by their ISPs, or with content easily easily discoverable otherwise. It will take the emergence of aggregators and archivers to find and package access to this content in a convenient form while also filtering out the spam. When that happens, it will be 1996 again, and we'll be sharing stuff over NNTP and reading it through entities like dejanews. It was a solid plan. A lot of old Usenet content is still around, which is more than can be said about content shared on privately-owned forums or Facebook.

nicodjimenez 8y ago

An inconvenient truth in the golden age of crypto mania. Even crypto itself cannot put up a good fight against centralization, as companies like Bitmain and Coinbase dominate the landscape. Decentralized protocols and centralized services on top of those protocols is the future.

tranchms 8y ago

Why don’t we create network systems that model real social networks? Can’t we combine centralization and decentralization? Must it be all one or the other?

gcmartinelli 8y ago

there's a relevant gap in his 'history of the internet' analysis where centralized web was basically all that existed for users (i.e. AOL walled gardens). as many things in society, these internet trends seem to follow cycles of discovery/innovation and improvement/cost-efficiency. and the same way the previous centralized web crumbled with the appearance of novel services, so will the current centralized networks. trust in innovation.

arisAlexis 8y ago

isn't the author aware that Kardashian is into Bitcoin and publicly announced it?

erikpukinskis 8y ago

It's the wrong year to pick winners and losers. There's a huge amount of stress in the system right now. The coming quakes will drastically reshape the landscape. Let's check in around 2030 and see if centralized is still winning.

poisonborz 8y ago

I don'think it would be too hard to sell decentralized, even in general terms. You can buy a tomato in a supermarket, most people do so. Yet a large amount of people buy it from farmers on markets, also a lot grow it themselves. Everybody prefers local, homegrown tomato over supermarket one, always, even if that is cheaper, controlled and easier to get, everyone understands the differences, even while knowing nothing about how to grow a tomato. Such differences would also be increasingly trivial for apps and data we use daily. Customization, inherent in every individual, would also be a powerful driving force. Why letting FB/Google etc at our data requires also less and less explanation.

jvanderbot 8y ago

Maybe this blog can survive on a single server answering direct calls from modems, but last time I checked, decentralization of content delivery was the rule, not the exception. Centralized content with decentralized systems won. And they're doing so well it all appears centralized.

simonjgreen 8y ago

I may be feeling a touch pedantic, perhaps I just live in a different world being on the ISP side, but the Internet is not centralised at all. Large quantities of traffic ends up going to certain central locations, but the network itself is decidedly decentralised. Just look at LINX for example and the other major IXs, nobody there is telling everyone else where to send their packets, they just go where needed. In fact LINX as an organisation is a members organisation run by its members with each one, big or small, having one vote. IXs, BGP, RIRs like RIPE, and the proliferation around the globe of access ISPs, all prove how decentralised the Internet is. But if the point the article is trying to make is "all this content is being hosted in fewer and fewer locations and that's bad" then I completely agree. It damages choice and hugely increases the blast radius of service outages. Now if Amazon and Facebook started offering end user connectivity, that's the time to really worry. cough Google.

PoespasAR 8y ago

Its just the beginning of decentralized. These articles are so easy to write.