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Except looking at the past 20 years or so it seems clear that the trend is going the other way around. Slack itself is an example of that, not long ago it would

by simias 8y ago

Except looking at the past 20 years or so it seems clear that the trend is going the other way around. Slack itself is an example of that, not long ago it would've been a set of self-hosted tools. People have ditched IRC in favor of Discord and friends, they've ditched decentralized forums, BBSs and mailing lists for social networks, everybody hosts everything using the same four or five cloud providers, streaming and direct download is much more popular than BitTorrent etc... Maybe this trend will reverse eventually but I don't really see the signs yet. The Cryptocurrency crowd keeps shouting "decentralization" but they still fail to create applications that can compete with the centralized alternatives in terms of usability, performance and cost. There have been many attempts at making decentralized social networks but they failed to gain mainstream adoption. IPFS works pretty well but again, hardly anybody uses it. I'm all for decentralization but there's no denying that there seems to be a path of least resistance towards centralized solutions. They're easier to develop, easier to maintain, easier to upgrade and often easier to use. So for me decentralization is the objective, but unfortunately it's not "clearly the end game".

uberswe 8y ago
It will take time before decentralised services become mainstream. It's slow right now and we are still learning, we need things to be easier. The backend is basically figured out at this point and we need to focus a bit more on UX. Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting. Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not the same :)
- simias 8y ago
  >It will take time before decentralised services become mainstream. Again, this is looking at things backwards IMO. You seem to imply that there's a slow momentum from a centralized web to a decentralized one when in fact there's been a rather fast momentum in exactly the opposite direction over the past decades. To me what you're saying sounds like "horses are about to become a very common way of moving goods". Maybe you're right but merely looking at the trend it's clearly not going that way at all. >The backend is basically figured out at this point and we need to focus a bit more on UX. You'll have to tell me more specifically what you have in mind there because that sounds very optimistic to me. We've had decentralized "backends" for as long as we've had the internet. The web is mostly decentralized by design. Even DNS is distributed across plenty of authorities for the various TLDs (even if each of them is effectively centralized and not anybody can become an authority). Email is decentralized. BitTorrent is decentralized. IRC is decentralized. We're collectively moving away from these technologies, not towards them. I'm personally still a heavy user of all three of these things but it definitely feels niche now (email obviously isn't but self-hosted email is). >Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting. Which is pretty much irrelevant in this conversation then. It's about the technology people use to share content with each other, not about how Blizzard chooses to update your WoW client. It's a locked-down, vendor-approved way of distributing software from a centralized authority. >Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not the same :) It's not the same but it's related. In general if something is truly decentralized then it becomes self-hostable otherwise it's more distributed than decentralized. Anybody can host their Bitcoin node, their Bittorent peer or their email server. I can't host a Facebook node.
itchyouch 8y ago
It needs to be as close to convenient in order to catch the masses. Even on the technical side, most tech products have convenience as a selling point to being more productive/effective/agile, etc.
wpietri 8y ago
Exactly. I understand the desire for decentralization. There is certainly a lot of hype, and in the cryptocurrency world it verges on religious belief. But I haven't yet seen any examples of the trend reversing. Even most of the very technically competent people I know are gradually moving toward central services. I'm part of a co-op of people with collocated servers. We started in 2000. We haven't had a new member in years, and we are gradually losing them. I'm at the point where I should replace my server, and I'm having a hard time coming up with reasons to justify the large capital expense and significant time cost versus moving it to somebody's cloud. And that's not even considering the benefits of moving to hosted services. Not worrying about spam, email deliverability, security patches, et cetera, ad nauseam. I think part of the problem is that the "decentralize!" crowd is willing to put up with a lot of practical inconveniences as long as something conforms to their ideological desires. Their ideology may be perfectly correct, but until it has practical consequences, most consumers won't shift. So they're going to need to come up with competitive services that are better than the existing ones. Better not just to them, but to regular users.
lorenzhs 8y ago
This is a bit of a shameless plug, but I just made a Show HN post about Glowing Bear, which is a web front-end for the WeeChat IRC client: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725038. It's entirely implemented as client-side javascript, and you can easily self-host it without any requests being made to other servers. For me, it solves the problem of accessing IRC wherever I am without having to fumble with ssh on my phone or monospace text. And it doesn't have the limited functionality of these modern web IRC clients implemented in node because it's just a front-end for WeeChat, which is one of the most powerful IRC clients around. Regarding your note on the path of least resistance leading to centralized solutions---Glowing Bear/WeeChat is definitely more work to set up than just signing up for Slack. You need a machine that runs WeeChat and get a TLS certificate so that the browser will let you connect securely. That definitely limits it to a somewhat nerdy demographic, even among the HN readers ;)
- kuschku 8y ago
  Weechat (with weechat android and glowingbear), IRCCloud, and Quassel (with Quasseldroid and quassel-webserver) are indeed awesome solutions for IRC. (Personally, I’m ofc biased, as I’m the dev of https://quasseldroid.info/ https://quasseldroid.info/). But I think for these solutions to gain more mainstream appeal, we’d need to make the setup much simpler, and work on ideally making it a single-click solution for an organization to set this up for their members. And maybe even provide hosted services (similar to IRCCloud) for the many users that would rather pay than run their own servers.
  - lorenzhs 8y ago
    Yes, you're absolutely correct. Setup is indeed more complicated than it should be for Glowing Bear. I would love to have an automated solution for it, I just don't want to be the one to build it :)
jack_pp 8y ago
20 years is a small timeframe in my opinion. Every new technology you exemplified is better in almost every way to the predecessor except for the fact that they hand the keys to the castle to a small group of people which the ordinary users don't care about until it starts hurting them, which has already started. Now I suspect we'll start seeing clones of facebook / slack etc but with a decentralized backend while offering all the features users care about seamlessly. This might take a while but it'll eventually come.

by simias 8y ago

uberswe 8y ago

It will take time before decentralised services become mainstream. It's slow right now and we are still learning, we need things to be easier. The backend is basically figured out at this point and we need to focus a bit more on UX. Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting. Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not the same :)

simias 8y ago
>It will take time before decentralised services become mainstream. Again, this is looking at things backwards IMO. You seem to imply that there's a slow momentum from a centralized web to a decentralized one when in fact there's been a rather fast momentum in exactly the opposite direction over the past decades. To me what you're saying sounds like "horses are about to become a very common way of moving goods". Maybe you're right but merely looking at the trend it's clearly not going that way at all. >The backend is basically figured out at this point and we need to focus a bit more on UX. You'll have to tell me more specifically what you have in mind there because that sounds very optimistic to me. We've had decentralized "backends" for as long as we've had the internet. The web is mostly decentralized by design. Even DNS is distributed across plenty of authorities for the various TLDs (even if each of them is effectively centralized and not anybody can become an authority). Email is decentralized. BitTorrent is decentralized. IRC is decentralized. We're collectively moving away from these technologies, not towards them. I'm personally still a heavy user of all three of these things but it definitely feels niche now (email obviously isn't but self-hosted email is). >Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting. Which is pretty much irrelevant in this conversation then. It's about the technology people use to share content with each other, not about how Blizzard chooses to update your WoW client. It's a locked-down, vendor-approved way of distributing software from a centralized authority. >Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not the same :) It's not the same but it's related. In general if something is truly decentralized then it becomes self-hostable otherwise it's more distributed than decentralized. Anybody can host their Bitcoin node, their Bittorent peer or their email server. I can't host a Facebook node.

itchyouch 8y ago

It needs to be as close to convenient in order to catch the masses. Even on the technical side, most tech products have convenience as a selling point to being more productive/effective/agile, etc.

wpietri 8y ago

Exactly. I understand the desire for decentralization. There is certainly a lot of hype, and in the cryptocurrency world it verges on religious belief. But I haven't yet seen any examples of the trend reversing. Even most of the very technically competent people I know are gradually moving toward central services. I'm part of a co-op of people with collocated servers. We started in 2000. We haven't had a new member in years, and we are gradually losing them. I'm at the point where I should replace my server, and I'm having a hard time coming up with reasons to justify the large capital expense and significant time cost versus moving it to somebody's cloud. And that's not even considering the benefits of moving to hosted services. Not worrying about spam, email deliverability, security patches, et cetera, ad nauseam. I think part of the problem is that the "decentralize!" crowd is willing to put up with a lot of practical inconveniences as long as something conforms to their ideological desires. Their ideology may be perfectly correct, but until it has practical consequences, most consumers won't shift. So they're going to need to come up with competitive services that are better than the existing ones. Better not just to them, but to regular users.

lorenzhs 8y ago

This is a bit of a shameless plug, but I just made a Show HN post about Glowing Bear, which is a web front-end for the WeeChat IRC client: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725038. It's entirely implemented as client-side javascript, and you can easily self-host it without any requests being made to other servers. For me, it solves the problem of accessing IRC wherever I am without having to fumble with ssh on my phone or monospace text. And it doesn't have the limited functionality of these modern web IRC clients implemented in node because it's just a front-end for WeeChat, which is one of the most powerful IRC clients around. Regarding your note on the path of least resistance leading to centralized solutions---Glowing Bear/WeeChat is definitely more work to set up than just signing up for Slack. You need a machine that runs WeeChat and get a TLS certificate so that the browser will let you connect securely. That definitely limits it to a somewhat nerdy demographic, even among the HN readers ;)

kuschku 8y ago
Weechat (with weechat android and glowingbear), IRCCloud, and Quassel (with Quasseldroid and quassel-webserver) are indeed awesome solutions for IRC. (Personally, I’m ofc biased, as I’m the dev of https://quasseldroid.info/ https://quasseldroid.info/). But I think for these solutions to gain more mainstream appeal, we’d need to make the setup much simpler, and work on ideally making it a single-click solution for an organization to set this up for their members. And maybe even provide hosted services (similar to IRCCloud) for the many users that would rather pay than run their own servers.
- lorenzhs 8y ago
  Yes, you're absolutely correct. Setup is indeed more complicated than it should be for Glowing Bear. I would love to have an automated solution for it, I just don't want to be the one to build it :)

jack_pp 8y ago

20 years is a small timeframe in my opinion. Every new technology you exemplified is better in almost every way to the predecessor except for the fact that they hand the keys to the castle to a small group of people which the ordinary users don't care about until it starts hurting them, which has already started. Now I suspect we'll start seeing clones of facebook / slack etc but with a decentralized backend while offering all the features users care about seamlessly. This might take a while but it'll eventually come.