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Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale. Email is federated, but everyone running

Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale. Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet) For a federated, decentralized system to work and resist centralization, it has to be the case that running a node is dead simple, cheap, and out-of-sight/out-of-mind. It also can't be the case that hosting on a more powerful cluster, colocated with other nodes, gives you large benefits or cost advantages, otherwise, it'll just get centralized again. Even cryptocurrencies fail this. They have terrible efficiency, but at least they were supposed to be relatively flat, instead of centralized and hierarchical, but instead, a majority of the hashing power is owned by a few large entities, so in effect, back to large financial players controlling much of the power. I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization, but in the mean time, beliefs that you'll achieve cyber/crypto-anarchy by clever protocol design and the federales won't be able to rubber-hose-cryptanalyze you, is a dangerous belief that diverts us away from demanding the government and society agree to the goals of freedom. If everyone wants unfreedom, underground internet usage is a slim consolation.

Arathorn 8y ago
The way to decentralise without the risk of inherent centralisation is to go p2p. If everyone installing an app runs their own instance and doesn’t need to pick a server, then the efficiency gains of a server drop off massively. This is why we’re hoping to steer Matrix from being decentralised-at-the-servers to being decentralised-at-the-clients.
- antocv 8y ago
  Cryptocurrencies are p2p yet centralized, bittorrent is p2p, yet a few search-engines and trackers compared to clients.
  - Arathorn 8y ago
    well, you don’t gave to have a tracker to seed p2p, and they don’t have to cause centralisation. search engines can and should also be decentralised :)
  - palunon 8y ago
    >yet a few search-enginescompared to clients Bittorrent doesn't have a search engine, so of course they are not decentralized. > yet a few trackers compared to clients Well, not if you count the DHT (the decentralized tracker).
- pferde 8y ago
  Is there any write-up regarding Matrix plans on this topic, please? Genuinely curious.
  - rakoo 8y ago
    Seconded, having the full Matrix way of architecting data synchronization available from any endpoint is something that can truly change the field.
- SamPatt 8y ago
  There is a major hurdle in getting people to install their own servers though. We've seen this with OpenBazaar. It makes p2p pretty simple out of the box but if it's not in browser or a mobile app many won't even try it once.
  - anderspitman 8y ago
    Something like Sandstorm[0] might be able to solve this, since then a person would hypothetically only need a single server (with a nice web interface) that they install all their decentralized apps into. In practice I think modifying the apps to be compatible is too much overhead. But I think something in the same vein could work. I'm sure @kentonv has some ideas on what the main roadblocks to adoption are. [0] https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
antocv 8y ago
Another problem of decentralized is search, even if the web remained decentralized in hypothetical world, each one hosts their own web-site being their own web-master and blog-hoster, searching in the decentralized-web would still be centralized. Why tho? If there was many decentralized-search-engines (YaCy is one or some such name), someone would still make a meta-engine which would be the one people use, since each one wouldnt want to lose out connections/indexes of any other search-engine, again leading to centralization due to cost and scale as you say.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  We laud Google for being our goto for everything, but it surprises me that search hasn't fragmented into specialised fields. Building a Google just for farming for example, seems like it could be better at serving that niche than gigantic Google, and people definitely have enough headspace for a few more websites if they provide value.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Google has one killer feature: It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. And so on. Google also understands simple plain language questions ("how do i do ... on ford mondeo mk4" works perfectly - but only Google can do that). It is even able to detect irrelevant results - e.g. it really filters just MK4 mondeos when I am looking for something, but I also had MK3 and putting MK3 into the query really did filter MK4 results away. I never had such success and productivity with any other search engine, and I really tried to like DuckDuckGo.
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      > It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. Can't say I see meaningful difference between DDG and Google on this anymore. DDG keeps getting better and Google has been on a downward spiral for some time. > It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. DDG does this as well. And unlike Google they aren't driving me crazy by ignoring my double quotes and verbatim searches.
saltyhitler 8y ago
> For a federated, decentralized system to work and resist centralization, it has to be the case that running a node is dead simple, cheap, and out-of-sight/out-of-mind. Imagine your ISP bundling a full node together with your modem etc. That would be a start. > I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization Centralization unfortunately is still at the core, but we should strive to add more nodes so we can achieve more distribution. The more distributed the system, the less corruptible it would be. As much as I hate censorship and blocking of content, I believe there is a place for it, for example, you don't want kids seeing pornography and the likes but I do hate it when they do it for political reasons, blocking campaigns or even conspiracy theories, I believe the mind should be able to explore and be critical of everything, this means being able to see/watch everything and analyze.
- gfody 8y ago
  good decentralized architecture is pretty well undermined by ISPs capping upstream bandwidth. you already can't host a popular website from home - your upstream bandwidth can't handle the traffic
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Razengan 8y ago
A swarm of insect-like drones maintaining a mesh network for client devices to tap into, and tree-shaped data storage towers connected with each other via fiber-optic roots (or a fungus-like substrate [0]) in a global network with a standard protocol for everyone to query/read/write. A worldwide Bionet, built from an amalgamation of semi-self-sustaining, solar-powered organics, electronics and EM/radio. [0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism-in-the-world http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism...
- xorand 8y ago
  After the IoT comes Gaia https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/after-the-iot-comes-gaia/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/after-the-i...
QualityReboot 8y ago
> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. I think this is what federation looks like when it works. Yeah, everyone uses Gmail, but it's also ok to use another service. It still works and delivers a pretty similar experience. Your messages make it out of the Gmail garden. > Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet) Geocities was one of many roughly equivalent services. It was sort of a social network, but it was mostly just free hosting. Anyone could still link to anywhere and being on geocities wasn't a requirement for being on the web. Squarespace is a pretty good product and not what I would consider harmul centralization, because it's still interoperable with other websites and they don't prevent people from hosting elsewhere. The web is still federated. Something different has happened with social media. Different social media services aren't interoperable. I can't message you on Twitter from Facebook, or tweet at you on LinkedIn. You must stay in their walled garden to interact with their users. They're at such a critical mass that almost everyone is in their garden. It seems like federation is a happy middle ground between decentralization and centralized walled gardens. Maybe something like Mastodon will some day become so popular that Twitter is forced to become part of the federation and compete on features and marketing instead of vendor lock-in. With a federated version of any type of social media clone, eventually new entrants will prefer to join the federation instead of trying to make a new walled garden. It wasn't really an option for Hotmail to only let you interact with other Hotmail users, because the federation was already established. There was tremendous demand for social media services, but no federation to provide those services when the demand hit and explosive growth happened, so now we have a centralization problem.
- beagle3 8y ago
  It’s becoming less OK to use a small service. Gmail and office365 will often classify mail from small provider as spam, with no feedback to the sender. I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated). I gave up and moved to FastMail because I don’t have the time to deal with this (and solving it once is no guarantee it won’t happen again) So, email is federated but effectively not decentralized - unless you use one of the central services, you are at risk from being obliviously blackholed at any second (that happens to large providers too, but there’s safety in numbers - it will be discovered sooner by someone)
otabdeveloper1 8y ago
> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of email servers are corporate servers, not in FANG datacenters.
- ThJ 8y ago
  Don't count the servers. Count the people. Only people who work in tertiary industries tend to have corporate email accounts, and they rarely contain personal data, only data owned by their employers. Many businesses have switched to FAANG services, though, because having an IT department is costly for businesses, and has largely gone out of fashion.
- tyingq 8y ago
  "I'm pretty sure the vast majority of email servers are corporate servers" Many are moving to Office365, and to a lesser degree, Gmail. Microsoft is making it financially difficult to justify running your own Exchange on-prem.
- dagw 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure the vast majority of email servers are corporate servers, not in FANG datacenters. 3-5 years ago I probably would have agreed with you. Today I'm not so sure. And even among the companies running their 'own' email servers, the physical hardware is very likely in a Microsoft/Amazon/Google datacenter.
bubblethink 8y ago
I don't see any decentralized services making a dent until the residential internet infrastructure improves by an order of magnitude. There is such a huge disparity between upload and download bandwidth that I fail to see any immediate future for decentralized or p2p replacements for things.
- layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
  And ipv6 deployment without NAT.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  > There is such a huge disparity between upload and download bandwidth that I fail to see any immediate future for decentralized or p2p replacements for things. I believe there are valid technical reasons for this, at least for coax connections; fiber not-so-much. At the same time, I get what you are saying. ...and this is how they want it. In short, they keep the "last mile" from allowing true "peering". The best you can do - and this is to mainly get around the TOS statements that (technically) prevent you from running servers (as well as physically blocking you from running anything on port 80 and 25 mainly, plus probably others) - is to purchase a business plan instead of a consumer plan. Though I am sure they will try to (or do) block this if the installation address is for a home and not an office (then again, what about small home offices and such?). I don't know a good way around any of these issues, as it seems all high-speed providers do similar things (most are aimed at prevention of spam and other similar reasons). Even the WISPs I've seen in my area have weird terms (one seems really great for the rural area they serve - until you come to the clause about not being allow to run BT because of "multiple streams"; I tend to wonder if they only allow a single user to use a browser - on a single page - or what).
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I suspect one thing that would help that is if upload bandwidth intensive activity grew in popularity. Also a matter of who they want to reach and why for demand. In terms of use cases decentralization is currently still in Cypherpunks (doing it for its own sake) and "connoisseurs" (doing it because what they want isn't available otherwise regardless if it is accessing paid content but bypassing geofences, infringing downloads, or banned content). I would like to see decentralization be viable as well but it is fairly niche and a solution looking for a problem. Currently media is downloading more than uploading even for video games. Client trust issues (and not allowing arbitrary cheating) encourage centralization to at least domain servers for the sake of validation and finding other players. I think something ARGy like say Pokemon Go but strategic (you have fixed resource pools and open knowledge of everything thus cheaters can instantly be flagged as not playing the same rules). But that would also be niche. One thing that really could use decentralization is IoT (along with actually making it worth useful and security). Of course the whole domain is sadly a hot mess of greed often about gathering as much data from their customer, screwing them over with needless connectivity requirements and considering actual functionality an afterthought and security an afterthought to that and then wondering why it isn't catching on. That is a whole other rant.
bitxbit 8y ago
Exactly this. However, it is still possible to create a virtual decentralized network on top of a federated/centralized network.
microcolonel 8y ago
> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. Well, federation is the sweet spot between distribution and centralization. I've run my own email service for quite some years now, it is just fine. A lot of people have bad experiences running their own mail senders though, because they do not go through the checklists and deliverability tests to make sure things come through. Google's SMTP service will only accept mail over TLS, most good email services will reject mail from servers which do not have a matching rDNS on their IP, most will reject senders who have not set up SPF and DKIM, some will reject those which do not have a DMARC policy (including a reporting address). If you use any good email deliverability testing tool, and iron these issues out in your configuration, you can fairly reliably deliver emails.
csbartus 8y ago
One of the best comments I’ve seen lately. Congratulations, and keep up!
LeonB 8y ago
This is a good insight and generally true. > Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale. I’d add “or by network effects” since these aren’t “efficienciences of scale” (related to increased marginal value not decreased marginal cost) and are clearly at play with some (many!) centralized systems.
hhs 8y ago
I wonder if we could build a decentralized system of a 6th dimension? Based on the US military doctrine, we've got 5 dimensions: air, sea, land, space, and cyber. There are 4 dimensions designed by nature and 1 dimension designed by humans. And we're able to engage differently (e.g., at worst, becoming 'domains of warfare') in each of these dimensions. Wouldn't it be neat to create a completely new 6th dimension, which is independent of the 5 we have, with distinctive features for its system? I'm curious if the brain-computer interface, like what Elon Musk is doing with Neuralink, could be that new dimension?
gabbygab 8y ago
Good point. But one way the internet is being decentralized is along national boundaries. The chinese, russians, south koreans, japanese and even the EU are now looking to protect it's turf. Wouldn't shock me if the internet truly becomes a network of national intranets. I suspect if the EU or any major player truly turns their nation into an intranet, it will accelerate the process with every nation controlling their own network and protecting their own interests, companies and information. Though highyl unlikely, if china ever becomes a dominant player on the internet, I could even see us closing ourselves off to protect our internet. I guess this is the price of success. It attracts political attention.
sanbor 8y ago
Sounds like nobody wants to do sysadmin work. If spinning your email server or web server would be as easy as opening a google or yahoo account then federetion would be a lot more affordable. But not even professional sysadmins want to admin and maintain servers (at least for personal use). Why several companies are trying to build self-driving cars but so few are building servers that you spin up and they're secure and work? We need "self-driving computers".
agumonkey 8y ago
as there been any research about waves or oscillations between centralization and decentralization ? computer started as one processor and distributed terminals, then cpu spread to terminals, then back to server/clients, then p2p. Lastly consoles are threatened by centralized gaming datacenters ..

Arathorn 8y ago

The way to decentralise without the risk of inherent centralisation is to go p2p. If everyone installing an app runs their own instance and doesn’t need to pick a server, then the efficiency gains of a server drop off massively. This is why we’re hoping to steer Matrix from being decentralised-at-the-servers to being decentralised-at-the-clients.

antocv 8y ago
Cryptocurrencies are p2p yet centralized, bittorrent is p2p, yet a few search-engines and trackers compared to clients.
- Arathorn 8y ago
  well, you don’t gave to have a tracker to seed p2p, and they don’t have to cause centralisation. search engines can and should also be decentralised :)
- palunon 8y ago
  >yet a few search-enginescompared to clients Bittorrent doesn't have a search engine, so of course they are not decentralized. > yet a few trackers compared to clients Well, not if you count the DHT (the decentralized tracker).
pferde 8y ago
Is there any write-up regarding Matrix plans on this topic, please? Genuinely curious.
- rakoo 8y ago
  Seconded, having the full Matrix way of architecting data synchronization available from any endpoint is something that can truly change the field.
SamPatt 8y ago
There is a major hurdle in getting people to install their own servers though. We've seen this with OpenBazaar. It makes p2p pretty simple out of the box but if it's not in browser or a mobile app many won't even try it once.
- anderspitman 8y ago
  Something like Sandstorm[0] might be able to solve this, since then a person would hypothetically only need a single server (with a nice web interface) that they install all their decentralized apps into. In practice I think modifying the apps to be compatible is too much overhead. But I think something in the same vein could work. I'm sure @kentonv has some ideas on what the main roadblocks to adoption are. [0] https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/

antocv 8y ago

Another problem of decentralized is search, even if the web remained decentralized in hypothetical world, each one hosts their own web-site being their own web-master and blog-hoster, searching in the decentralized-web would still be centralized. Why tho? If there was many decentralized-search-engines (YaCy is one or some such name), someone would still make a meta-engine which would be the one people use, since each one wouldnt want to lose out connections/indexes of any other search-engine, again leading to centralization due to cost and scale as you say.

Jedi72 8y ago
We laud Google for being our goto for everything, but it surprises me that search hasn't fragmented into specialised fields. Building a Google just for farming for example, seems like it could be better at serving that niche than gigantic Google, and people definitely have enough headspace for a few more websites if they provide value.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Google has one killer feature: It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. And so on. Google also understands simple plain language questions ("how do i do ... on ford mondeo mk4" works perfectly - but only Google can do that). It is even able to detect irrelevant results - e.g. it really filters just MK4 mondeos when I am looking for something, but I also had MK3 and putting MK3 into the query really did filter MK4 results away. I never had such success and productivity with any other search engine, and I really tried to like DuckDuckGo.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    > It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. Can't say I see meaningful difference between DDG and Google on this anymore. DDG keeps getting better and Google has been on a downward spiral for some time. > It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. DDG does this as well. And unlike Google they aren't driving me crazy by ignoring my double quotes and verbatim searches.

saltyhitler 8y ago

> For a federated, decentralized system to work and resist centralization, it has to be the case that running a node is dead simple, cheap, and out-of-sight/out-of-mind. Imagine your ISP bundling a full node together with your modem etc. That would be a start. > I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization Centralization unfortunately is still at the core, but we should strive to add more nodes so we can achieve more distribution. The more distributed the system, the less corruptible it would be. As much as I hate censorship and blocking of content, I believe there is a place for it, for example, you don't want kids seeing pornography and the likes but I do hate it when they do it for political reasons, blocking campaigns or even conspiracy theories, I believe the mind should be able to explore and be critical of everything, this means being able to see/watch everything and analyze.

gfody 8y ago
good decentralized architecture is pretty well undermined by ISPs capping upstream bandwidth. you already can't host a popular website from home - your upstream bandwidth can't handle the traffic

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Razengan 8y ago

A swarm of insect-like drones maintaining a mesh network for client devices to tap into, and tree-shaped data storage towers connected with each other via fiber-optic roots (or a fungus-like substrate [0]) in a global network with a standard protocol for everyone to query/read/write. A worldwide Bionet, built from an amalgamation of semi-self-sustaining, solar-powered organics, electronics and EM/radio. [0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism-in-the-world http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism...

xorand 8y ago
After the IoT comes Gaia https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/after-the-iot-comes-gaia/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/after-the-i...

QualityReboot 8y ago

> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. I think this is what federation looks like when it works. Yeah, everyone uses Gmail, but it's also ok to use another service. It still works and delivers a pretty similar experience. Your messages make it out of the Gmail garden. > Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet) Geocities was one of many roughly equivalent services. It was sort of a social network, but it was mostly just free hosting. Anyone could still link to anywhere and being on geocities wasn't a requirement for being on the web. Squarespace is a pretty good product and not what I would consider harmul centralization, because it's still interoperable with other websites and they don't prevent people from hosting elsewhere. The web is still federated. Something different has happened with social media. Different social media services aren't interoperable. I can't message you on Twitter from Facebook, or tweet at you on LinkedIn. You must stay in their walled garden to interact with their users. They're at such a critical mass that almost everyone is in their garden. It seems like federation is a happy middle ground between decentralization and centralized walled gardens. Maybe something like Mastodon will some day become so popular that Twitter is forced to become part of the federation and compete on features and marketing instead of vendor lock-in. With a federated version of any type of social media clone, eventually new entrants will prefer to join the federation instead of trying to make a new walled garden. It wasn't really an option for Hotmail to only let you interact with other Hotmail users, because the federation was already established. There was tremendous demand for social media services, but no federation to provide those services when the demand hit and explosive growth happened, so now we have a centralization problem.

beagle3 8y ago
It’s becoming less OK to use a small service. Gmail and office365 will often classify mail from small provider as spam, with no feedback to the sender. I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated). I gave up and moved to FastMail because I don’t have the time to deal with this (and solving it once is no guarantee it won’t happen again) So, email is federated but effectively not decentralized - unless you use one of the central services, you are at risk from being obliviously blackholed at any second (that happens to large providers too, but there’s safety in numbers - it will be discovered sooner by someone)

otabdeveloper1 8y ago

> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of email servers are corporate servers, not in FANG datacenters.

ThJ 8y ago
Don't count the servers. Count the people. Only people who work in tertiary industries tend to have corporate email accounts, and they rarely contain personal data, only data owned by their employers. Many businesses have switched to FAANG services, though, because having an IT department is costly for businesses, and has largely gone out of fashion.
tyingq 8y ago
"I'm pretty sure the vast majority of email servers are corporate servers" Many are moving to Office365, and to a lesser degree, Gmail. Microsoft is making it financially difficult to justify running your own Exchange on-prem.
dagw 8y ago
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of email servers are corporate servers, not in FANG datacenters. 3-5 years ago I probably would have agreed with you. Today I'm not so sure. And even among the companies running their 'own' email servers, the physical hardware is very likely in a Microsoft/Amazon/Google datacenter.

bubblethink 8y ago

I don't see any decentralized services making a dent until the residential internet infrastructure improves by an order of magnitude. There is such a huge disparity between upload and download bandwidth that I fail to see any immediate future for decentralized or p2p replacements for things.

layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
And ipv6 deployment without NAT.
cr0sh 8y ago
> There is such a huge disparity between upload and download bandwidth that I fail to see any immediate future for decentralized or p2p replacements for things. I believe there are valid technical reasons for this, at least for coax connections; fiber not-so-much. At the same time, I get what you are saying. ...and this is how they want it. In short, they keep the "last mile" from allowing true "peering". The best you can do - and this is to mainly get around the TOS statements that (technically) prevent you from running servers (as well as physically blocking you from running anything on port 80 and 25 mainly, plus probably others) - is to purchase a business plan instead of a consumer plan. Though I am sure they will try to (or do) block this if the installation address is for a home and not an office (then again, what about small home offices and such?). I don't know a good way around any of these issues, as it seems all high-speed providers do similar things (most are aimed at prevention of spam and other similar reasons). Even the WISPs I've seen in my area have weird terms (one seems really great for the rural area they serve - until you come to the clause about not being allow to run BT because of "multiple streams"; I tend to wonder if they only allow a single user to use a browser - on a single page - or what).
Nasrudith 8y ago
I suspect one thing that would help that is if upload bandwidth intensive activity grew in popularity. Also a matter of who they want to reach and why for demand. In terms of use cases decentralization is currently still in Cypherpunks (doing it for its own sake) and "connoisseurs" (doing it because what they want isn't available otherwise regardless if it is accessing paid content but bypassing geofences, infringing downloads, or banned content). I would like to see decentralization be viable as well but it is fairly niche and a solution looking for a problem. Currently media is downloading more than uploading even for video games. Client trust issues (and not allowing arbitrary cheating) encourage centralization to at least domain servers for the sake of validation and finding other players. I think something ARGy like say Pokemon Go but strategic (you have fixed resource pools and open knowledge of everything thus cheaters can instantly be flagged as not playing the same rules). But that would also be niche. One thing that really could use decentralization is IoT (along with actually making it worth useful and security). Of course the whole domain is sadly a hot mess of greed often about gathering as much data from their customer, screwing them over with needless connectivity requirements and considering actual functionality an afterthought and security an afterthought to that and then wondering why it isn't catching on. That is a whole other rant.

bitxbit 8y ago

Exactly this. However, it is still possible to create a virtual decentralized network on top of a federated/centralized network.

microcolonel 8y ago

> Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. Well, federation is the sweet spot between distribution and centralization. I've run my own email service for quite some years now, it is just fine. A lot of people have bad experiences running their own mail senders though, because they do not go through the checklists and deliverability tests to make sure things come through. Google's SMTP service will only accept mail over TLS, most good email services will reject mail from servers which do not have a matching rDNS on their IP, most will reject senders who have not set up SPF and DKIM, some will reject those which do not have a DMARC policy (including a reporting address). If you use any good email deliverability testing tool, and iron these issues out in your configuration, you can fairly reliably deliver emails.

csbartus 8y ago

One of the best comments I’ve seen lately. Congratulations, and keep up!

LeonB 8y ago

This is a good insight and generally true. > Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale. I’d add “or by network effects” since these aren’t “efficienciences of scale” (related to increased marginal value not decreased marginal cost) and are clearly at play with some (many!) centralized systems.

hhs 8y ago

I wonder if we could build a decentralized system of a 6th dimension? Based on the US military doctrine, we've got 5 dimensions: air, sea, land, space, and cyber. There are 4 dimensions designed by nature and 1 dimension designed by humans. And we're able to engage differently (e.g., at worst, becoming 'domains of warfare') in each of these dimensions. Wouldn't it be neat to create a completely new 6th dimension, which is independent of the 5 we have, with distinctive features for its system? I'm curious if the brain-computer interface, like what Elon Musk is doing with Neuralink, could be that new dimension?

gabbygab 8y ago

Good point. But one way the internet is being decentralized is along national boundaries. The chinese, russians, south koreans, japanese and even the EU are now looking to protect it's turf. Wouldn't shock me if the internet truly becomes a network of national intranets. I suspect if the EU or any major player truly turns their nation into an intranet, it will accelerate the process with every nation controlling their own network and protecting their own interests, companies and information. Though highyl unlikely, if china ever becomes a dominant player on the internet, I could even see us closing ourselves off to protect our internet. I guess this is the price of success. It attracts political attention.

sanbor 8y ago

Sounds like nobody wants to do sysadmin work. If spinning your email server or web server would be as easy as opening a google or yahoo account then federetion would be a lot more affordable. But not even professional sysadmins want to admin and maintain servers (at least for personal use). Why several companies are trying to build self-driving cars but so few are building servers that you spin up and they're secure and work? We need "self-driving computers".

agumonkey 8y ago

as there been any research about waves or oscillations between centralization and decentralization ? computer started as one processor and distributed terminals, then cpu spread to terminals, then back to server/clients, then p2p. Lastly consoles are threatened by centralized gaming datacenters ..