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> You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. Obviously you can have decentralized services that address this important 'presence' issu

> You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. Obviously you can have decentralized services that address this important 'presence' issue. IMO the issue is that we have conflated the 'functional goal' with 'architecture'. The 'goal', for me at least, is public information systems that protect civil rights and resist the rise of tyranny. That goal, after thinking about this space for the past 25 years, can be served with a combination of centralized and decentralized services, and a mix of grassroots and corporate players. To get there, we need (a) societal consensus that privacy in fact matters quite a lot to, and is a bedrock of, our civilization, and (b) [the recognition that] ideological bias is a deadly sin for a system architect.

o09rdk 7y ago
I was going to say something similar, or at least related. Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I don't think that means the decentralized architecture has failed. I think people need to distinguish decentralization as a network system state, and decentralization as an affordance. Centralized structures on a decentralized protocol can reorganize themselves, but if you build the system as centralized, it's much harder, if not impossible, barring some implicit decentralized aspect of the architecture. The question isn't so much "do decentralized systems end up as centralized," it is "can a disrupted decentralized system reorganize itself?" It's obviously relevant to your point in that the reason for decentralized architectures, as you say, is to maintain communication in the presence of threats, especially to free exchange of information. It's not necessarily to maintain a given network structure state. I couldn't care less if a handful of servers become dominant on Mastodon or IPFS or whatever, if it's easy to change which handful of servers they are should they start to become compromised in some way.

o09rdk 7y ago

I was going to say something similar, or at least related. Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I don't think that means the decentralized architecture has failed. I think people need to distinguish decentralization as a network system state, and decentralization as an affordance. Centralized structures on a decentralized protocol can reorganize themselves, but if you build the system as centralized, it's much harder, if not impossible, barring some implicit decentralized aspect of the architecture. The question isn't so much "do decentralized systems end up as centralized," it is "can a disrupted decentralized system reorganize itself?" It's obviously relevant to your point in that the reason for decentralized architectures, as you say, is to maintain communication in the presence of threats, especially to free exchange of information. It's not necessarily to maintain a given network structure state. I couldn't care less if a handful of servers become dominant on Mastodon or IPFS or whatever, if it's easy to change which handful of servers they are should they start to become compromised in some way.