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It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evang

by jasode 7y ago

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits. However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche groups but I don't see it becoming mainstream. To purposely be provocative to spur discussion, I will make a bold claim: Decentralization is an unstable equilibrium. It's the centralization that becomes the stable status quo. If tpcip protocol and http protocol are already decentralized, why do we have centralized services that have "too much power" such as Facebook/Google/Youtube? It's because different actors can spend more money on their particular http node than other http nodes. Those unequal economic forces is what makes decentralization tend towards centralization. There is no technical protocol specification that can prevent that. E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on Github? It's because John doesn't want to install a git server on his laptop and punch a DMZ hole through his home router and leave his laptop up & running 24 hours a day to serve up his git repo. He'd rather spend the weekend playing with his children. And Jane doesn't want to spend $30 on a Raspberry Pi and install Gitlab on it to serve up her git repo. Multiply John and Jane's by a million other devs with their own various reasons for not serving up their git repos in a decentralized manner and the emergent phenomenon you get is something like Github. See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization. I wish we would discuss the above factors much more often and there were more articles about it.

telmich 7y ago
Love the challenge. Let me start by replying to your DMZ comment: with IPv6, you actually have to rethink and with it you can organise the Internet very different from today. I agree with you that people don't want to maintain complex systems. But then again, running a git server or even cgit, is a matter of little minutes spent, especially if you use ready to deploy toolchains. I also think you have a point in terms of equilibrium - people are in general more comfortable with something they know. And due to the long history of IPv4 shortage, people are used to having private IPv4 space only. It is like animals in a zoo - we don't know anymore, how good the life used to be with public IPv4 addresses, we have grown up without them. What I have seen from many discussions and visits in the last months is that IT startups are now reconsidering and embracing IPv6, because it gives freedom. I'd also say the approach is not to directly replace facebook & co., but to think completely different. Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network. Thinking different is the key for decentralisation.
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  You're missing the point. Even if running a git server is easy, not everyone will bother to maintain it and setup a regular backup process. Also, where do you back that data up to? Some central server or DHT/BitTorrent. Inherently, AWS is popular because companies would rather pay to have someone deal with the headache of managing hardware and infrastructure. > Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network. Because I'm not always online and you might not be when I'm.
  - telmich 7y ago
    > Because I'm not always online and you might not be when I'm. That's a good thing, because maybe I don't want to be able to reached all the time. If you want to, you can add your IPv6 address on your phone, which is virtually always online (I actually do this on my phone).
    - olah_1 7y ago
      >If you want to, you can add your IPv6 address on your phone, which is virtually always online (I actually do this on my phone). Is there a guide on how to do this? How do you manage it? I'd love to self host from a computer just sitting in my house. Way easier than something like a VPS.
    - idle_zealot 7y ago
      >you can add your IPv6 address on your phone How does one achieve this while a phone is roaming between cell towers and various wifi access points?
      - telmich 7y ago
        With a wireguard based IPv6 VPN for example. It's exactly what you can get on IPv6VPN.ch
- theamk 7y ago
  Re IPv6, I don’t expect connectivity to suddenly appear. The NATs will be gone, but I bet you that every single home router will get a firewall with a default “block incoming” policy. A new network protocol does not make all the security bugs disappear overnight. And for users, it does not really matter if they have to visit router admin page to set up NAT port forwarding or open up the port in firewall.
Ghexor 7y ago
I like to study this force as well and I agree with your claim. A degree of centralization appears to be quite useful in the real world. Recently I've been thinking about modelling an economic system after biological ones. It seems they face a very similar problem of resource allocation. Extreme centralization (think big tech) could be thought of as a form of cancer in this frame. Biology solves this through a limited lifespan of cells. So an economy modelled after it might include something like a lifespan for companies. I'm interested in what you think on this or if anyone knows exsisting resources on this relationship.
nindwen 7y ago
While decentralized protocols don't entirely prevent centralization, they're still better than if the protocol was centralized. While Facebook and Google exist, we can still make websites. While most people use Gmail, we can still run our own mail servers. Even if 90% of users use the centralized service, the protocol being open gives enormous value to the remaining 10%. And as long as the 10% keep the protocol open, the _possibility_ of decentralization can keep the centralized services honest. We only need to keep the googles of the world from completely shutting down the open protocols. I mean, even that can get hard, but it's still entirely reasonable goall.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >as long as the 10% keep the protocol open, the _possibility_ of decentralization can keep the centralized services honest. This is the avenue we should be traveling. This is what makes the internet a better place.
- christiansakai 7y ago
  Yup this is my thinking as well. Also this opens up for smaller niche communities to entirely setup whatever they want. I.e, their own social media, their own youtube, etc. Small rural communities can setup their own email server, chat, without dependencies on Slack or Google.
- dorgo 7y ago
  >Even if 90% of users use the centralized service, the protocol being open gives enormous value to the remaining 10% It's more than that. The 90% benefit greatly from the openess too. All the @gmail.com can talk to @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com or @whatever.com. Try to get your whatsapp to talk to my telegram app or some other chat app. It's a pain to don't have whatsapp and only a small inconvenience for whatsapp-users to have to deal with somebody like me. But it's my way to point out what is broken about chat apps.
- mc3 7y ago
  Dropping into the conversation late, to say that this is right - but - the danger is that Google controls the defacto browser and defacto web standards as well as search, and yes a large chunk of email, the biggest video hosting service and mobile operating system! So in reality I think the open standards will erode in practical terms to be Google standards over time, unless something is actively done to prevent that.
solatic 7y ago
> Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization. Ironically enough, people do not live year-round in centralized hotels with cleaning services provided. They live in their own decentralized homes, and make an economic decision whether to take care of their cleaning needs by themselves, or to outsource and hire somebody to clean their domicile for them. There seems to be an inherent assumption that running your own services necessitates taking care of maintenance yourself. I think this is a mistake - we just haven't been able to develop yet a model where we own decentralized installations and outsource the maintenance, even though in many other instances, this is the case - not just cleaning and houses, but endpoints and OS updates.
- mdtusz 7y ago
  This isn't a very good comparison though for looking at technology. The problem of washing dishes, cleaning a kitchen, vacuuming, making a bed etc. Is O(n) in _economic_ complexity. Managing data and technology services is somewhere around O(log(n)). Managing 100 servers is much more difficult than managing 1, but managing 200 is not much more difficult than 100.
  - solatic 7y ago
    It belies the point though that people at large prefer decentralization, just not the costs involved, until a model comes along which reduces the costs to a level which people can afford.
- astine 7y ago
  "Ironically enough, people do not live year-round in centralized hotels with cleaning services provided. They live in their own decentralized homes, and make an economic decision whether to take care of their cleaning needs by themselves, or to outsource and hire somebody to clean their domicile for them." I think that this is mostly to do with the fact that you can't simply take advantage of economies of scale and centralize ever one into a single housing block the way you can with a lot of web-based businesses. Despite this, a lot of people do live in apartments complexes with centralized maintenance and utilities. Moving to a house is about gaining space than independence, I think.
blamestross 7y ago
The centralization-decentralization cycle is about efficiency vs robustness trade-off at a system level. When we have a decentralized system that feels safe, we centralize it to increase efficiency. Eventually we have a disaster that convinces us that decentralization was worth it and we re-create it. Then eventually we grow complacent and repeat the process. When I design a decentralized system now, I just assume it can only live a decade or two before it gets killed and I need to do it again under new branding.
- helpPeople 7y ago
  I've been warning people of a certain 1T$ tech company that abuses customers and developers under the guise of centralization. Our worst fears have become true. Banning apps, anti consumer technology, anti competitive practices that effect non users.
Darthy 7y ago
I don't think centralization automatically becomes the status quo. The reason why we have the current centralization of amazon, facebook, github etc is because the web as we are currently using it has centralization built in: A browser always connect to a fixed server. But that is not god-given, we created it that way 25 years ago, and we could allow additional other ways. A browser could instead also be connecting to a generalized service for selling, communicating etc. Another way how this could be changed: We could bypass centralization by ensuring that a webpage on ones device can aggregate many services, by emulating visiting other websites in the background, and we make sure that those sites will not be able to find out that are are not being called directly as the main address, but will only be giving out their data. For that, we would have to remove current Cross-domain requests restrictions.
- telmich 7y ago
  Actually yacy goes this direction: https://yacy.net/ https://yacy.net/
- entropicdrifter 7y ago
  On a semi-related note, IPFS allows your web browser to connect to web sites without necessarily downloading anything/everything from a single source, instead allowing arbitrary content to be distributed to any/all client machines. https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
sooheon 7y ago
That trend toward centralization and aggregation is mirrored in wealth, influence, and matter. Barring outside intervention, returns on capital will outpace returns on industry, businesses will monopolize, and water will flow downhill. Because it is so natural, those who would oppose these forces are motivated to do unnatural things like blog, protest, legislate, regulate... Governments redistribute wealth, hold antitrust hearings, and people write blog posts like this one. I agree with you, unless we find a way to fundamentally alter incentives, effort spent toward decentralizing is effort spent swimming upstream. Of course even in streams that eventually end up in the sea, there's a lot of activity in eddies.
naasking 7y ago
To summarize, centralization allows certain efficiencies that are not permitted in decentralized systems, and those efficiencies have value. Of course, decentralization itself also has value, so the question in any given circumstance is, "what balance between efficiency and decentralized robustness do I need?"
kodablah 7y ago
> To purposely be provocative to spur discussion I will make a bold claim: Decentralization is an unstable equilibrium. It's the centralization that becomes the stable status quo. Spurred. Firstly, this ignores the variance between absolute decentralization and absolute centralization. By reducing the discussion to black and white, we can't recognize a middleground that may not be as decentralized as all-in-home yet not so centralized as owned by a few. I'd argue that much of the internet remains in this middleground, popularity notwithstanding. Secondly, what is and isn't mainstream is the result of ease of use, implementation quality, and improvements over alternatives. Popularity and other knock-on effects may follow, but needn't be the initial goals. That these aren't achieved in decentralized setups is not evidence that they never will. When they are, and the economic forces then come along with adoption (that's the usual order after all), you'll see a shift in focus without necessarily a shift towards centralization. Until then we accept that centralized versions of more popular services are better implemented currently. One thing everyone agrees on, the vast majority of users don't care (nor should they).
- telmich 7y ago
  I would say if you assume that markets don't regulate themselves to the best, the argument that users should not care, is not valid. Or put it the other way: if users don't care, they will be exposed to changes / forces they don't control nor want. I think this is very similar to political activity: if you don't vote, your life will be more influenced by the opinions of others. If you vote (care), then you can make a change
  - kodablah 7y ago
    > the argument that users should not care, is not valid I agree from the user's perspective. The point is nuanced but important - users should care, but the reality is they don't and from an implementer's perspective we should neither expect nor require them to. So to rephrase, I mean "users should not have to care in order to use the product".
    - telmich 7y ago
socialdemocrat 7y ago
Here is my counter to these thoughts: Decentralized internet was not created by a myriad of decentralized decisions. A centralized authority came up with the idea and created TCP/IP. Just like centralized decisions were made to create the decentralized/balance of power democratic systems we have today. Capitalism itself is naturally centralizing. That is why we have anti-thrust laws. We don't just leave it to consumers to make sure centralization does not happen in the market. It is the job of the government to prevent it. I agree with you that centralization is the natural order or things. But I disagree with your implication that it is somehow the individual users who are responsible for keeping a system decentralized. In much of Europe, a large number of cell phone service choice and broadband choice was created because government mandated that companies with infrastructure had to let other companies borrow it and offer services on it. Capitalism and free markets exist because a centralized government maintains it. The solution IMHO is not to blame the individuals but to combine in collective action and collectively agree/decide we want a different arrangement. In other words one has to bring this to the political level. That could mean anti trust action against google, facebook etc.
- cy6erlion 7y ago
  > Capitalism itself is naturally centralizing. That is why we have anti-thrust laws. We don't just leave it to consumers to make sure centralization does not happen in the market. It is the job of the government to prevent it. Centralized social systems such as Governments, Banks etc exist mostly because we need someone we trust (Bank) to arbitrate interactions between two peers, if you remove these kind of trust with the help of tech (eg cryptography) the bank and governments become obsolete because we can now verify things for our self without a 3rd party.
  - nosuchthing 7y ago
    Simply not true. Faith in cryptography will not help anyone with fraud, theft, and trust. Naive neo-liberal libertarians and anarchocapitalists attempt to claim deregulation will just work because they've never encountered abuse, fraud, negligence, or read any history. One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017. In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking information on all holders with balances >$20,000. Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini coefficient would mean that a government would only need to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with it the ability to tank the price. With that said, two points. First, while one would not want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as then only one person would have all of the digital currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost the network), in practice it appears that a very high level of wealth centralization is still compatible with the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of arbitrarily choosing a threshold. ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it does not directly measure the number of individuals or entities required to compromise a system. Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck. Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in >51% of mining being compromised. - Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase) https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...
macspoofing 7y ago
>It's the centralization that becomes the stable status quo. I wouldn't go as far as 'stable'. Centralization is very susceptible to entropy and therefore there needs to be a constant renewing/repairing force so that the structure does not collapse on itself. Centralization is a big reason why Communist regimes fail after a few decades (even when they get big immediate gains)
gfodor 7y ago
The layer of the stack matters somewhat. You can make it easy to get John to deploy git to AWS. If it's easy enough, cheap enough, and the software were as nice as GitHub, that'd be a reasonable counter-force to centralization. The ship has sailed in the example you mention, but for future categories of internet applications, enabling easy self-hosting seems like a solid aspect to a multi-pronged strategy towards preventing centralization of those platforms. (Incidentally, this is what we're doing with hubs.mozilla.com, enabling self hosting as a means of pre-empting the rush towards centralized avatar communication services)
jka 7y ago
That trend seems real, yep, and your points ring true to me. In response to the items you mention (in reverse order), decentralization could become rapidly more attractive if & when: 2) The time required to configure, install, and use decentralized services reduces to within a small margin of the equivalent centralized systems 1) The cost of losing custody of your personal data, and the cost of being influenced and constrained within a proprietary system are more apparent and can be stacked onto the 'free' price tag Work towards this takes a long time, especially while software engineers are in such demand in the profitable private sector (which, although there are exceptions, tends to skew towards building proprietary software). In general I'd tend to believe that another, second trend is that decentralized and open source software does always eventually catch up (in a kind of asymptotic progress curve to infinity) - and that we'll reach this 'switch margin' eventually, it's just a question of how long it will take.
zzzcpan 7y ago
I think you are confusing anti-competitive control pursuing forces of capital-backed companies and capitalism in general with natural forces. Centralization is unnatural, this is why animals are territorial and people don't all live in the same one country. And why capitalist ideology requires propaganda and force to keep people from revolting. Nobody wants to submit to somebody and give them all the control they want. And it's not hard to make things decentralized, federation is not that intrusive for example, it's hard to find a way to fund and sustain it when everyone from the system who can fund it also wants centralization, dominance and control.
cy6erlion 7y ago
I see this as a problem with trust. Decentralized systems require less trust for them to work (think consensus mechanisms) but ironically users today don't trust the tech because it is still early IMO, centralized systems need more trust. People these days are using centralized systems because they trust the centralized system (FB, Google) more then the decentralized tech.
- metaobserver 7y ago
  I agree and think the solution would be to go back to a web-of-trust scheme where identities are transitively validated and reputation used to ensure well-behaved operation.
pjc50 7y ago
> See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization. Exactly. It's not a technological phenomenon, it's an economic one. It's actually present in all markets, but traditionally there is a "local" effect that allows variation to exist (if it's not free to ship goods to anywhere in the world), or a negative return to scale. Technological goods, especially SaaS, can be "sold" anywhere in the world for near-zero marginal cost and tend to have positive returns to scale. Conventional economics dictates that this will tend to a monopoly. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-increasing-return-to-scale-incompatible-with-perfect-competition https://www.quora.com/Why-is-increasing-return-to-scale-inco... Decentralists also tend to to recognise that, for most users of communications services, having a central authority to discipline bad actors results in an improvement to the service. This didn't exist for email so the Spamhaus and related services had to be invented.
- naringas 7y ago
  > Technological goods, especially SaaS, I think it's more accurate to call them "digital goods", because IMO what enables the less than near-zero marginal cost (I consider them negligible costs) is the digital nature of the "merchandise" (a jet engine is a technological good, but it is material, not digital) other than that, I completely agree. The trend towards centralization comes from the economics of the market (not from the nature of technology)
- jka 7y ago
  Regarding your point about spam and bad actors: even though it's not the solution we've ended up with (i.e. training spam models, creating rulesets, sharing blacklists etc), this problem space always makes me think of Microsoft's 'Penny Black': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project) There are further economic problem there; people won't want to pay anything for email, for example, now that they're accustomed to having it for free. But if sending a message came at the cost of a few smartphone GPU cycles -- or some other widely accessible but difficult-to-hoard resource -- and as long as it didn't affect a person's mental perception of their bank balance -- perhaps there'd be opportunities for something like Penny Black again.
dmwallin 7y ago
Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decentralized. A counter argument is that intelligent design changes the relative value of these different forms but I'm not sure whether there's enough evidence to support this. My theory on the matter is that the trend towards centralized forms in our current society has a lot to do with Conway's Law (organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.) We live in a society that currently has a very hierarchal, centralized and structured systems of power. This means that the subsystems (eg Corporations) and the artifacts of those systems are subtly pushed towards a similar form.
- F00bart 7y ago
  This. The influence of Conway’s law is underappreciated. We are all trained to see hierarchies as the only principle for building structure, it’s a dominant normative ideology. Once we see how to build decentralized systems, we can discover they are often more resilient and more effective. But we have to overcome the current centralization of power and our own tendency to structure the world in hierarchies.
- didericis 7y ago
  Completely agree. I think the efficiencies and benefits to centralization OP pointed out are real, but that there are practical benefits to decentralization as well. Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could. I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. I don’t think a lot of centralized solutions are currently centralized because they’re efficient solutions to uniform problems; I don’t think most everyday, practical problems are all that uniform when you take everything into account (ex: supply availability for physical goods, UI expectations/preferences for digital stuff) although again, there can be/often is at least some gains in efficiency. I think it has more to do with the organizational forces you describe.
maram 7y ago
>See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not Agree >This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits. Exactly! This week I tweeted this old clip of Steve Jobs praising decentralization https://twitter.com/maramesque/status/1194136650500255744?s=21 https://twitter.com/maramesque/status/1194136650500255744?s=... then it hit me how Steve worked so hard to make Apple centralized. Sure, Apple was great during his lifetime, but what happened to this very centralized company after Jobs passed away? Did Apple live up to Jobs legacy and promises from protecting users privacy to building great products? I think we will always live in a world full of centralized products used by the mainstream. The mainstream will eventually get smarter and founders will always face the pressure to improve products, respect users privacy and attention. The days of launching an app from your college and watching people downloading it from all over the world are long gone.
netcan 7y ago
sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. - Reading list/blogrolls please :) Idk is one state is necessarily more equalibrium-ish, in general. I tend to think it's more of a khaldun-esqu cycle. Decentralisation is often stronger at creativeness & flexibility, so is necessary for innovation. It's good at finding solutions to unarticulated problems. There were multiple centralised/proprietary attempts at inventing the web, but I don't think anything but a decentralised www could have become what it did. Ceentralised systems have their own strengths. I agree that Facebook is easier than html, and that the easiest option will win. The interesting (imo) question is "why?" One reason is undoubtedly economic. There was/is massive incentive to centralize & own chunks of the web. Decentralised www doesn't have that. Another reason is (imo) related to the "OSS UI" problem. When programming problems are specific and legible (add multiple language support, fix crashing bugs, etc?), OSS works really well. When the problem is "create a fun and intuitive UI" OSS can really suck. IE, Facebook beats www the way osx beats Linux. Lastly, what level of centralised or decentralised are we looking at. The www's uses (sites, users, code...) is decentralised but the protocols, browsers, DNS and such are very centralised. If you want to invent a way of sending a proprietary way of sending a new type of online wink, go ahead. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Getting something new into the official protocols OTOH..... near impossible. So... In some senses, Facebook was/is the nimble decentralised actor. One of many. The www (the protocols) is/was the monolithic sloth.
boomlinde 7y ago
> E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on Github? If cooking is decentralized, why is there so much concentration of food at the mall?
ignoramous 7y ago
https://sandstrom.io https://sandstrom.io solves this problem but I guess they had trouble with traction as they set out to build a two-sided marketplace for a market that wasn't ready. Selling to consumers and SMBs is a huge hurdle, as they'd settle for convenience and cheap when given the choice. And due to SaaS' economies of scale, a decentralised solution is never going to be able to compete with that. I'm currently building a VPN mesh network for personal use, and the more time I spend thinking abt it, the more https://zerotier.com https://zerotier.com 's model makes sense. What if consumers, SMBs can create VxLANs over the internet and then host apps and services in that space (Sandstorm Oasis) that are completely private and only accessible to devices enrolled to participate in that VxLAN.
z3t4 7y ago
Economy at scale and network effect. The marginal cost, eg the cost for github to host one more repo is very small. But for each new repo they host the value of the service grows.
3xblah 7y ago
The trend I see is that an enormous amount of effort is made to make "centralisation" easy, while a relatively minute effort goes toward making "decentralisation" easy. Another name for decentralisaton in this context (computers and the internet) is "DIY". Perhaps we could agree that centralisation in this context is inherently easier than decentralisation to begin with. If true, then what I see is enormous effort to make it even easier. "Frictionless". Recent history has shown that centralisation in this context is a proven path toward making money, directly or indirectly, at users' expense. As such, decentralisation (DIY) is the path toward helping users save money or avoiding sacraficing other things of value (privacy, control, etc.). Perhaps time spent on making DIY easier is worth the investment.
dandelo1953 7y ago
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and related market influences since entering the career world 20 years ago. It started around early 2000's, while working in market research. Got me thinking about all the money dumped into it being a waste... if people could just exchange information freely in some organized fashion. During 2000s - 2015s the corporations worked hard to form the scaffolding of, and then solidify this organization as they envisioned it. They too saw the opportunity I was seeing. However, their incentivized profits over morals. The temptation to harness control over this exchange information was to great to overcome. They started off innocently enough. They were just "gardens" without the walls at first. In general, the public was free to admire, as well as take part in, what felt like cultivating meaningful dialogue that theoretically should only enhance life for everyone. Fast forward 15 years, the novelty of the garden has worn off. We want to go explore something new. But as the time wore on, the garden slowly evolved into something more akin to a maze. Now we are looking for a way out, but cannot even distinguish the walls of the maze from the exterior walls of the garden. At this point, I probably don't have to say it. But this "walled garden" is a really just a euphemism for intellectual slavery. I have ideas on what needs to be done, but they seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Especially when it comes to privacy issues. To me this tells me I am on the right track, because as hard as I look for other answers, I still end up back with decentralization. This problem is hard. It requires faithful means to accurately identify and attribute data to its source creator. I believe all the tech we need to make it work is readily available. The missing ingredient is incentive. But it's a chicken/egg problem. Until a majority of people want to faithfully cooperate together, it'll not happen. And no single person will agree to work on something that needs cooperation of the majority if they don't believe in it. Enough ranting... I'm looking further for people to have discussions along these lines. I have ventured out into meetups and whatnot, but I just cannot make connections with like enough minded people to take my ideas further. I know they aren't unique, but they are worthless without others to share with... can email at [s/.//("L.O.O.M.I.S.5.3")] at google's mail dot com Even if you can manage to navigate this maze, there is really no way out. The perimeter
- dandelo1953 7y ago
  guess that should be s/\.// ...
shoo 7y ago
Paul Krugman -- Increasing Returns and Economic Geography > This paper develops a simple model that shows how a country can endogenously become differentiated into an industrialized "core" and an agricultural "periphery." In order to realize scale economies while minimizing transport costs, manufacturing firms tend to locate in the region with larger demand, but the location of demand itself depends on the distribution of manufacturing. Emergence of a core-periphery pattern depends on transportation costs, economies of scale, and the share of manufacturing in national income
pornel 7y ago
Abuse is another one. Note how you almost never see spam on GitHub. And you can effortlessly cross-reference issues across repos and notify other users by mentioning them. That works, because global view across all repos makes spotting and blocking abuse easier, and moderation is possible thanks to the business side subsidizing it. Contrast that with WordPress trackbacks. They're all spam. And blog comments are full of spam too, because individual operators don't have know-how to fight them, other than outsourcing spam filtering to… a centralized service.
- metaobserver 7y ago
  Maybe we don't really need those "trackbacks" and unmoderated comments from random anonymous users. Maybe decentralized services should function strictly on a web-of-trust basis. In the end, if you have something valuable to contribute in a given domain, you have either joined a relevant organization or have contact with people in the field. Maybe collaboration between complete strangers with unknown reputation, is not a good idea and explains why it doesn't function like that in the real world?
int_19h 7y ago
This isn't really any different from any other market. In general, unregulated markets in the context of a property framework that allows for unrestricted accumulation of capital tend to be monopolized over time. And, of course, such monopolization will tend to correspond to centralization of services. With your GitHub example, I think the better question isn't why John doesn't want to run their own server - that much is obvious. It is, rather, why doesn't John want to go to hosted GitLab instead?
EGreg 7y ago
I see your trend, but you have missed the answer that is common to all those examples. I have been talking about decentralization before it was cool. Since at least 2011. I want decentralized power generation via solar panels, I want mesh networks to be widely adopted etc. Those networks already exist. Here is the answer: SOFTWARE. We have amazing hardware - phones, tablets, routers, computers. There is no good software to run on those things. Facebook, Google, YouTube - why are they so popular? It’s the software stupid :) (it’s an expression, not calling you stupid). Facebook has better social networking capabilities with real time chat, videoconference calls etc. than Wordpress or PHPBB. That said, Wordpress powers 30% of the Web. But most of the Web is kinda static, not dynamic like Facebook / Slack / Telegram which took MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO DEVELOP. Now, if I ask you, with your amazing hardware, how would you collaborate on a document? Why of course Google Docs or maybe Dropbox etc. WHY? THEY HAVE THE SOFTWARE! They didn’t give it to you. They have it on their backend servers. Same with YouTube - they do all the transcoding, social networking etc. Why is github popular? Because you have profiles, ratings etc. The always-on broadband led to an explosion of “software as a service” models, and “the cloud”. Once upon a time there was AOL, Compuserv and MSN. Steve Case was the Mark Zuckerberg of the day. Then TBL invented the Web Browser which didnt really do much but it let anyone run a web server permissionlessly and HTTP was an open protocol. Fast forward 10 years and aol is just a website. Everyone left the walled garden, starting with the brands. Why have AOL KEYWORD FACEBOOK when you have FACEBOOK.COM. The Web is what in fact allowed facebook, google and amazon to even exist. AOL would have never given them permission!!!! So today you had those sites and they have the software of Web 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever. Which open software could disrupt all this? SOCIAL NETWORKING AND COLLABORATION. Web 3.0. Meaning user accounts, profiles, realtime updates, notifications, videoconferencing and maybe payments. My company built exactly this and more (events, group rides etc.) We are like a more modern Wordpress / Drupal codebase. And we are working on a utility token to monetize the ecosystem See https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform the video there Also see https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token (speaks about how to get from a feudal society to a free market on the Web). Please see this for broader societal implications: https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog (latest article) Look through the articles on that blog for more info.
brokenmachine 7y ago
There are very interesting ways around this, eg with some decentralized architecture supporting coins to pay hosters to host people's data, eg Axiom https://axiom.org/ https://axiom.org/ There's no reason github couldn't exist in a truly decentralized environment where people retain ownership of their data, and also retaining its tiered payment structure. It's just a matter of market forces giving them an incentive to move in such a direction. I believe most people would choose to retain ownership of their data if they could, as long as it's free and zero effort.

by jasode 7y ago

telmich 7y ago

Love the challenge. Let me start by replying to your DMZ comment: with IPv6, you actually have to rethink and with it you can organise the Internet very different from today. I agree with you that people don't want to maintain complex systems. But then again, running a git server or even cgit, is a matter of little minutes spent, especially if you use ready to deploy toolchains. I also think you have a point in terms of equilibrium - people are in general more comfortable with something they know. And due to the long history of IPv4 shortage, people are used to having private IPv4 space only. It is like animals in a zoo - we don't know anymore, how good the life used to be with public IPv4 addresses, we have grown up without them. What I have seen from many discussions and visits in the last months is that IT startups are now reconsidering and embracing IPv6, because it gives freedom. I'd also say the approach is not to directly replace facebook & co., but to think completely different. Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network. Thinking different is the key for decentralisation.

aloknnikhil 7y ago
You're missing the point. Even if running a git server is easy, not everyone will bother to maintain it and setup a regular backup process. Also, where do you back that data up to? Some central server or DHT/BitTorrent. Inherently, AWS is popular because companies would rather pay to have someone deal with the headache of managing hardware and infrastructure. > Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network. Because I'm not always online and you might not be when I'm.
- telmich 7y ago
  > Because I'm not always online and you might not be when I'm. That's a good thing, because maybe I don't want to be able to reached all the time. If you want to, you can add your IPv6 address on your phone, which is virtually always online (I actually do this on my phone).
  - olah_1 7y ago
    >If you want to, you can add your IPv6 address on your phone, which is virtually always online (I actually do this on my phone). Is there a guide on how to do this? How do you manage it? I'd love to self host from a computer just sitting in my house. Way easier than something like a VPS.
  - idle_zealot 7y ago
    >you can add your IPv6 address on your phone How does one achieve this while a phone is roaming between cell towers and various wifi access points?
    - telmich 7y ago
      With a wireguard based IPv6 VPN for example. It's exactly what you can get on IPv6VPN.ch
theamk 7y ago
Re IPv6, I don’t expect connectivity to suddenly appear. The NATs will be gone, but I bet you that every single home router will get a firewall with a default “block incoming” policy. A new network protocol does not make all the security bugs disappear overnight. And for users, it does not really matter if they have to visit router admin page to set up NAT port forwarding or open up the port in firewall.

Ghexor 7y ago

I like to study this force as well and I agree with your claim. A degree of centralization appears to be quite useful in the real world. Recently I've been thinking about modelling an economic system after biological ones. It seems they face a very similar problem of resource allocation. Extreme centralization (think big tech) could be thought of as a form of cancer in this frame. Biology solves this through a limited lifespan of cells. So an economy modelled after it might include something like a lifespan for companies. I'm interested in what you think on this or if anyone knows exsisting resources on this relationship.

nindwen 7y ago

While decentralized protocols don't entirely prevent centralization, they're still better than if the protocol was centralized. While Facebook and Google exist, we can still make websites. While most people use Gmail, we can still run our own mail servers. Even if 90% of users use the centralized service, the protocol being open gives enormous value to the remaining 10%. And as long as the 10% keep the protocol open, the _possibility_ of decentralization can keep the centralized services honest. We only need to keep the googles of the world from completely shutting down the open protocols. I mean, even that can get hard, but it's still entirely reasonable goall.

bilbo0s 7y ago
>as long as the 10% keep the protocol open, the _possibility_ of decentralization can keep the centralized services honest. This is the avenue we should be traveling. This is what makes the internet a better place.
christiansakai 7y ago
Yup this is my thinking as well. Also this opens up for smaller niche communities to entirely setup whatever they want. I.e, their own social media, their own youtube, etc. Small rural communities can setup their own email server, chat, without dependencies on Slack or Google.
dorgo 7y ago
>Even if 90% of users use the centralized service, the protocol being open gives enormous value to the remaining 10% It's more than that. The 90% benefit greatly from the openess too. All the @gmail.com can talk to @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com or @whatever.com. Try to get your whatsapp to talk to my telegram app or some other chat app. It's a pain to don't have whatsapp and only a small inconvenience for whatsapp-users to have to deal with somebody like me. But it's my way to point out what is broken about chat apps.
mc3 7y ago
Dropping into the conversation late, to say that this is right - but - the danger is that Google controls the defacto browser and defacto web standards as well as search, and yes a large chunk of email, the biggest video hosting service and mobile operating system! So in reality I think the open standards will erode in practical terms to be Google standards over time, unless something is actively done to prevent that.

solatic 7y ago

> Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization. Ironically enough, people do not live year-round in centralized hotels with cleaning services provided. They live in their own decentralized homes, and make an economic decision whether to take care of their cleaning needs by themselves, or to outsource and hire somebody to clean their domicile for them. There seems to be an inherent assumption that running your own services necessitates taking care of maintenance yourself. I think this is a mistake - we just haven't been able to develop yet a model where we own decentralized installations and outsource the maintenance, even though in many other instances, this is the case - not just cleaning and houses, but endpoints and OS updates.

mdtusz 7y ago
This isn't a very good comparison though for looking at technology. The problem of washing dishes, cleaning a kitchen, vacuuming, making a bed etc. Is O(n) in _economic_ complexity. Managing data and technology services is somewhere around O(log(n)). Managing 100 servers is much more difficult than managing 1, but managing 200 is not much more difficult than 100.
- solatic 7y ago
  It belies the point though that people at large prefer decentralization, just not the costs involved, until a model comes along which reduces the costs to a level which people can afford.
astine 7y ago
"Ironically enough, people do not live year-round in centralized hotels with cleaning services provided. They live in their own decentralized homes, and make an economic decision whether to take care of their cleaning needs by themselves, or to outsource and hire somebody to clean their domicile for them." I think that this is mostly to do with the fact that you can't simply take advantage of economies of scale and centralize ever one into a single housing block the way you can with a lot of web-based businesses. Despite this, a lot of people do live in apartments complexes with centralized maintenance and utilities. Moving to a house is about gaining space than independence, I think.

blamestross 7y ago

The centralization-decentralization cycle is about efficiency vs robustness trade-off at a system level. When we have a decentralized system that feels safe, we centralize it to increase efficiency. Eventually we have a disaster that convinces us that decentralization was worth it and we re-create it. Then eventually we grow complacent and repeat the process. When I design a decentralized system now, I just assume it can only live a decade or two before it gets killed and I need to do it again under new branding.

helpPeople 7y ago
I've been warning people of a certain 1T$ tech company that abuses customers and developers under the guise of centralization. Our worst fears have become true. Banning apps, anti consumer technology, anti competitive practices that effect non users.

Darthy 7y ago

I don't think centralization automatically becomes the status quo. The reason why we have the current centralization of amazon, facebook, github etc is because the web as we are currently using it has centralization built in: A browser always connect to a fixed server. But that is not god-given, we created it that way 25 years ago, and we could allow additional other ways. A browser could instead also be connecting to a generalized service for selling, communicating etc. Another way how this could be changed: We could bypass centralization by ensuring that a webpage on ones device can aggregate many services, by emulating visiting other websites in the background, and we make sure that those sites will not be able to find out that are are not being called directly as the main address, but will only be giving out their data. For that, we would have to remove current Cross-domain requests restrictions.

telmich 7y ago
Actually yacy goes this direction: https://yacy.net/ https://yacy.net/
entropicdrifter 7y ago
On a semi-related note, IPFS allows your web browser to connect to web sites without necessarily downloading anything/everything from a single source, instead allowing arbitrary content to be distributed to any/all client machines. https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/

sooheon 7y ago

That trend toward centralization and aggregation is mirrored in wealth, influence, and matter. Barring outside intervention, returns on capital will outpace returns on industry, businesses will monopolize, and water will flow downhill. Because it is so natural, those who would oppose these forces are motivated to do unnatural things like blog, protest, legislate, regulate... Governments redistribute wealth, hold antitrust hearings, and people write blog posts like this one. I agree with you, unless we find a way to fundamentally alter incentives, effort spent toward decentralizing is effort spent swimming upstream. Of course even in streams that eventually end up in the sea, there's a lot of activity in eddies.

naasking 7y ago

To summarize, centralization allows certain efficiencies that are not permitted in decentralized systems, and those efficiencies have value. Of course, decentralization itself also has value, so the question in any given circumstance is, "what balance between efficiency and decentralized robustness do I need?"

kodablah 7y ago

> To purposely be provocative to spur discussion I will make a bold claim: Decentralization is an unstable equilibrium. It's the centralization that becomes the stable status quo. Spurred. Firstly, this ignores the variance between absolute decentralization and absolute centralization. By reducing the discussion to black and white, we can't recognize a middleground that may not be as decentralized as all-in-home yet not so centralized as owned by a few. I'd argue that much of the internet remains in this middleground, popularity notwithstanding. Secondly, what is and isn't mainstream is the result of ease of use, implementation quality, and improvements over alternatives. Popularity and other knock-on effects may follow, but needn't be the initial goals. That these aren't achieved in decentralized setups is not evidence that they never will. When they are, and the economic forces then come along with adoption (that's the usual order after all), you'll see a shift in focus without necessarily a shift towards centralization. Until then we accept that centralized versions of more popular services are better implemented currently. One thing everyone agrees on, the vast majority of users don't care (nor should they).

telmich 7y ago
I would say if you assume that markets don't regulate themselves to the best, the argument that users should not care, is not valid. Or put it the other way: if users don't care, they will be exposed to changes / forces they don't control nor want. I think this is very similar to political activity: if you don't vote, your life will be more influenced by the opinions of others. If you vote (care), then you can make a change
- kodablah 7y ago
  > the argument that users should not care, is not valid I agree from the user's perspective. The point is nuanced but important - users should care, but the reality is they don't and from an implementer's perspective we should neither expect nor require them to. So to rephrase, I mean "users should not have to care in order to use the product".
  - telmich 7y ago

socialdemocrat 7y ago

Here is my counter to these thoughts: Decentralized internet was not created by a myriad of decentralized decisions. A centralized authority came up with the idea and created TCP/IP. Just like centralized decisions were made to create the decentralized/balance of power democratic systems we have today. Capitalism itself is naturally centralizing. That is why we have anti-thrust laws. We don't just leave it to consumers to make sure centralization does not happen in the market. It is the job of the government to prevent it. I agree with you that centralization is the natural order or things. But I disagree with your implication that it is somehow the individual users who are responsible for keeping a system decentralized. In much of Europe, a large number of cell phone service choice and broadband choice was created because government mandated that companies with infrastructure had to let other companies borrow it and offer services on it. Capitalism and free markets exist because a centralized government maintains it. The solution IMHO is not to blame the individuals but to combine in collective action and collectively agree/decide we want a different arrangement. In other words one has to bring this to the political level. That could mean anti trust action against google, facebook etc.

cy6erlion 7y ago
> Capitalism itself is naturally centralizing. That is why we have anti-thrust laws. We don't just leave it to consumers to make sure centralization does not happen in the market. It is the job of the government to prevent it. Centralized social systems such as Governments, Banks etc exist mostly because we need someone we trust (Bank) to arbitrate interactions between two peers, if you remove these kind of trust with the help of tech (eg cryptography) the bank and governments become obsolete because we can now verify things for our self without a 3rd party.
- nosuchthing 7y ago
  Simply not true. Faith in cryptography will not help anyone with fraud, theft, and trust. Naive neo-liberal libertarians and anarchocapitalists attempt to claim deregulation will just work because they've never encountered abuse, fraud, negligence, or read any history. One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017. In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking information on all holders with balances >$20,000. Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini coefficient would mean that a government would only need to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with it the ability to tank the price. With that said, two points. First, while one would not want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as then only one person would have all of the digital currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost the network), in practice it appears that a very high level of wealth centralization is still compatible with the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of arbitrarily choosing a threshold. ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it does not directly measure the number of individuals or entities required to compromise a system. Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck. Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in >51% of mining being compromised. - Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase) https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...

macspoofing 7y ago

>It's the centralization that becomes the stable status quo. I wouldn't go as far as 'stable'. Centralization is very susceptible to entropy and therefore there needs to be a constant renewing/repairing force so that the structure does not collapse on itself. Centralization is a big reason why Communist regimes fail after a few decades (even when they get big immediate gains)

gfodor 7y ago

The layer of the stack matters somewhat. You can make it easy to get John to deploy git to AWS. If it's easy enough, cheap enough, and the software were as nice as GitHub, that'd be a reasonable counter-force to centralization. The ship has sailed in the example you mention, but for future categories of internet applications, enabling easy self-hosting seems like a solid aspect to a multi-pronged strategy towards preventing centralization of those platforms. (Incidentally, this is what we're doing with hubs.mozilla.com, enabling self hosting as a means of pre-empting the rush towards centralized avatar communication services)

jka 7y ago

That trend seems real, yep, and your points ring true to me. In response to the items you mention (in reverse order), decentralization could become rapidly more attractive if & when: 2) The time required to configure, install, and use decentralized services reduces to within a small margin of the equivalent centralized systems 1) The cost of losing custody of your personal data, and the cost of being influenced and constrained within a proprietary system are more apparent and can be stacked onto the 'free' price tag Work towards this takes a long time, especially while software engineers are in such demand in the profitable private sector (which, although there are exceptions, tends to skew towards building proprietary software). In general I'd tend to believe that another, second trend is that decentralized and open source software does always eventually catch up (in a kind of asymptotic progress curve to infinity) - and that we'll reach this 'switch margin' eventually, it's just a question of how long it will take.

zzzcpan 7y ago

I think you are confusing anti-competitive control pursuing forces of capital-backed companies and capitalism in general with natural forces. Centralization is unnatural, this is why animals are territorial and people don't all live in the same one country. And why capitalist ideology requires propaganda and force to keep people from revolting. Nobody wants to submit to somebody and give them all the control they want. And it's not hard to make things decentralized, federation is not that intrusive for example, it's hard to find a way to fund and sustain it when everyone from the system who can fund it also wants centralization, dominance and control.

cy6erlion 7y ago

I see this as a problem with trust. Decentralized systems require less trust for them to work (think consensus mechanisms) but ironically users today don't trust the tech because it is still early IMO, centralized systems need more trust. People these days are using centralized systems because they trust the centralized system (FB, Google) more then the decentralized tech.

metaobserver 7y ago
I agree and think the solution would be to go back to a web-of-trust scheme where identities are transitively validated and reputation used to ensure well-behaved operation.

pjc50 7y ago

> See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization. Exactly. It's not a technological phenomenon, it's an economic one. It's actually present in all markets, but traditionally there is a "local" effect that allows variation to exist (if it's not free to ship goods to anywhere in the world), or a negative return to scale. Technological goods, especially SaaS, can be "sold" anywhere in the world for near-zero marginal cost and tend to have positive returns to scale. Conventional economics dictates that this will tend to a monopoly. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-increasing-return-to-scale-incompatible-with-perfect-competition https://www.quora.com/Why-is-increasing-return-to-scale-inco... Decentralists also tend to to recognise that, for most users of communications services, having a central authority to discipline bad actors results in an improvement to the service. This didn't exist for email so the Spamhaus and related services had to be invented.

naringas 7y ago
> Technological goods, especially SaaS, I think it's more accurate to call them "digital goods", because IMO what enables the less than near-zero marginal cost (I consider them negligible costs) is the digital nature of the "merchandise" (a jet engine is a technological good, but it is material, not digital) other than that, I completely agree. The trend towards centralization comes from the economics of the market (not from the nature of technology)
jka 7y ago
Regarding your point about spam and bad actors: even though it's not the solution we've ended up with (i.e. training spam models, creating rulesets, sharing blacklists etc), this problem space always makes me think of Microsoft's 'Penny Black': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project) There are further economic problem there; people won't want to pay anything for email, for example, now that they're accustomed to having it for free. But if sending a message came at the cost of a few smartphone GPU cycles -- or some other widely accessible but difficult-to-hoard resource -- and as long as it didn't affect a person's mental perception of their bank balance -- perhaps there'd be opportunities for something like Penny Black again.

dmwallin 7y ago

Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decentralized. A counter argument is that intelligent design changes the relative value of these different forms but I'm not sure whether there's enough evidence to support this. My theory on the matter is that the trend towards centralized forms in our current society has a lot to do with Conway's Law (organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.) We live in a society that currently has a very hierarchal, centralized and structured systems of power. This means that the subsystems (eg Corporations) and the artifacts of those systems are subtly pushed towards a similar form.

F00bart 7y ago
This. The influence of Conway’s law is underappreciated. We are all trained to see hierarchies as the only principle for building structure, it’s a dominant normative ideology. Once we see how to build decentralized systems, we can discover they are often more resilient and more effective. But we have to overcome the current centralization of power and our own tendency to structure the world in hierarchies.
didericis 7y ago
Completely agree. I think the efficiencies and benefits to centralization OP pointed out are real, but that there are practical benefits to decentralization as well. Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could. I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. I don’t think a lot of centralized solutions are currently centralized because they’re efficient solutions to uniform problems; I don’t think most everyday, practical problems are all that uniform when you take everything into account (ex: supply availability for physical goods, UI expectations/preferences for digital stuff) although again, there can be/often is at least some gains in efficiency. I think it has more to do with the organizational forces you describe.

maram 7y ago

>See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not Agree >This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits. Exactly! This week I tweeted this old clip of Steve Jobs praising decentralization https://twitter.com/maramesque/status/1194136650500255744?s=21 https://twitter.com/maramesque/status/1194136650500255744?s=... then it hit me how Steve worked so hard to make Apple centralized. Sure, Apple was great during his lifetime, but what happened to this very centralized company after Jobs passed away? Did Apple live up to Jobs legacy and promises from protecting users privacy to building great products? I think we will always live in a world full of centralized products used by the mainstream. The mainstream will eventually get smarter and founders will always face the pressure to improve products, respect users privacy and attention. The days of launching an app from your college and watching people downloading it from all over the world are long gone.

netcan 7y ago

sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. - Reading list/blogrolls please :) Idk is one state is necessarily more equalibrium-ish, in general. I tend to think it's more of a khaldun-esqu cycle. Decentralisation is often stronger at creativeness & flexibility, so is necessary for innovation. It's good at finding solutions to unarticulated problems. There were multiple centralised/proprietary attempts at inventing the web, but I don't think anything but a decentralised www could have become what it did. Ceentralised systems have their own strengths. I agree that Facebook is easier than html, and that the easiest option will win. The interesting (imo) question is "why?" One reason is undoubtedly economic. There was/is massive incentive to centralize & own chunks of the web. Decentralised www doesn't have that. Another reason is (imo) related to the "OSS UI" problem. When programming problems are specific and legible (add multiple language support, fix crashing bugs, etc?), OSS works really well. When the problem is "create a fun and intuitive UI" OSS can really suck. IE, Facebook beats www the way osx beats Linux. Lastly, what level of centralised or decentralised are we looking at. The www's uses (sites, users, code...) is decentralised but the protocols, browsers, DNS and such are very centralised. If you want to invent a way of sending a proprietary way of sending a new type of online wink, go ahead. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Getting something new into the official protocols OTOH..... near impossible. So... In some senses, Facebook was/is the nimble decentralised actor. One of many. The www (the protocols) is/was the monolithic sloth.

boomlinde 7y ago

> E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on Github? If cooking is decentralized, why is there so much concentration of food at the mall?

ignoramous 7y ago

https://sandstrom.io https://sandstrom.io solves this problem but I guess they had trouble with traction as they set out to build a two-sided marketplace for a market that wasn't ready. Selling to consumers and SMBs is a huge hurdle, as they'd settle for convenience and cheap when given the choice. And due to SaaS' economies of scale, a decentralised solution is never going to be able to compete with that. I'm currently building a VPN mesh network for personal use, and the more time I spend thinking abt it, the more https://zerotier.com https://zerotier.com 's model makes sense. What if consumers, SMBs can create VxLANs over the internet and then host apps and services in that space (Sandstorm Oasis) that are completely private and only accessible to devices enrolled to participate in that VxLAN.

z3t4 7y ago

Economy at scale and network effect. The marginal cost, eg the cost for github to host one more repo is very small. But for each new repo they host the value of the service grows.

3xblah 7y ago

The trend I see is that an enormous amount of effort is made to make "centralisation" easy, while a relatively minute effort goes toward making "decentralisation" easy. Another name for decentralisaton in this context (computers and the internet) is "DIY". Perhaps we could agree that centralisation in this context is inherently easier than decentralisation to begin with. If true, then what I see is enormous effort to make it even easier. "Frictionless". Recent history has shown that centralisation in this context is a proven path toward making money, directly or indirectly, at users' expense. As such, decentralisation (DIY) is the path toward helping users save money or avoiding sacraficing other things of value (privacy, control, etc.). Perhaps time spent on making DIY easier is worth the investment.

dandelo1953 7y ago

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and related market influences since entering the career world 20 years ago. It started around early 2000's, while working in market research. Got me thinking about all the money dumped into it being a waste... if people could just exchange information freely in some organized fashion. During 2000s - 2015s the corporations worked hard to form the scaffolding of, and then solidify this organization as they envisioned it. They too saw the opportunity I was seeing. However, their incentivized profits over morals. The temptation to harness control over this exchange information was to great to overcome. They started off innocently enough. They were just "gardens" without the walls at first. In general, the public was free to admire, as well as take part in, what felt like cultivating meaningful dialogue that theoretically should only enhance life for everyone. Fast forward 15 years, the novelty of the garden has worn off. We want to go explore something new. But as the time wore on, the garden slowly evolved into something more akin to a maze. Now we are looking for a way out, but cannot even distinguish the walls of the maze from the exterior walls of the garden. At this point, I probably don't have to say it. But this "walled garden" is a really just a euphemism for intellectual slavery. I have ideas on what needs to be done, but they seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Especially when it comes to privacy issues. To me this tells me I am on the right track, because as hard as I look for other answers, I still end up back with decentralization. This problem is hard. It requires faithful means to accurately identify and attribute data to its source creator. I believe all the tech we need to make it work is readily available. The missing ingredient is incentive. But it's a chicken/egg problem. Until a majority of people want to faithfully cooperate together, it'll not happen. And no single person will agree to work on something that needs cooperation of the majority if they don't believe in it. Enough ranting... I'm looking further for people to have discussions along these lines. I have ventured out into meetups and whatnot, but I just cannot make connections with like enough minded people to take my ideas further. I know they aren't unique, but they are worthless without others to share with... can email at [s/.//("L.O.O.M.I.S.5.3")] at google's mail dot com Even if you can manage to navigate this maze, there is really no way out. The perimeter

dandelo1953 7y ago
guess that should be s/\.// ...

shoo 7y ago

Paul Krugman -- Increasing Returns and Economic Geography > This paper develops a simple model that shows how a country can endogenously become differentiated into an industrialized "core" and an agricultural "periphery." In order to realize scale economies while minimizing transport costs, manufacturing firms tend to locate in the region with larger demand, but the location of demand itself depends on the distribution of manufacturing. Emergence of a core-periphery pattern depends on transportation costs, economies of scale, and the share of manufacturing in national income

pornel 7y ago

Abuse is another one. Note how you almost never see spam on GitHub. And you can effortlessly cross-reference issues across repos and notify other users by mentioning them. That works, because global view across all repos makes spotting and blocking abuse easier, and moderation is possible thanks to the business side subsidizing it. Contrast that with WordPress trackbacks. They're all spam. And blog comments are full of spam too, because individual operators don't have know-how to fight them, other than outsourcing spam filtering to… a centralized service.

metaobserver 7y ago
Maybe we don't really need those "trackbacks" and unmoderated comments from random anonymous users. Maybe decentralized services should function strictly on a web-of-trust basis. In the end, if you have something valuable to contribute in a given domain, you have either joined a relevant organization or have contact with people in the field. Maybe collaboration between complete strangers with unknown reputation, is not a good idea and explains why it doesn't function like that in the real world?

int_19h 7y ago

This isn't really any different from any other market. In general, unregulated markets in the context of a property framework that allows for unrestricted accumulation of capital tend to be monopolized over time. And, of course, such monopolization will tend to correspond to centralization of services. With your GitHub example, I think the better question isn't why John doesn't want to run their own server - that much is obvious. It is, rather, why doesn't John want to go to hosted GitLab instead?

EGreg 7y ago

I see your trend, but you have missed the answer that is common to all those examples. I have been talking about decentralization before it was cool. Since at least 2011. I want decentralized power generation via solar panels, I want mesh networks to be widely adopted etc. Those networks already exist. Here is the answer: SOFTWARE. We have amazing hardware - phones, tablets, routers, computers. There is no good software to run on those things. Facebook, Google, YouTube - why are they so popular? It’s the software stupid :) (it’s an expression, not calling you stupid). Facebook has better social networking capabilities with real time chat, videoconference calls etc. than Wordpress or PHPBB. That said, Wordpress powers 30% of the Web. But most of the Web is kinda static, not dynamic like Facebook / Slack / Telegram which took MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO DEVELOP. Now, if I ask you, with your amazing hardware, how would you collaborate on a document? Why of course Google Docs or maybe Dropbox etc. WHY? THEY HAVE THE SOFTWARE! They didn’t give it to you. They have it on their backend servers. Same with YouTube - they do all the transcoding, social networking etc. Why is github popular? Because you have profiles, ratings etc. The always-on broadband led to an explosion of “software as a service” models, and “the cloud”. Once upon a time there was AOL, Compuserv and MSN. Steve Case was the Mark Zuckerberg of the day. Then TBL invented the Web Browser which didnt really do much but it let anyone run a web server permissionlessly and HTTP was an open protocol. Fast forward 10 years and aol is just a website. Everyone left the walled garden, starting with the brands. Why have AOL KEYWORD FACEBOOK when you have FACEBOOK.COM. The Web is what in fact allowed facebook, google and amazon to even exist. AOL would have never given them permission!!!! So today you had those sites and they have the software of Web 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever. Which open software could disrupt all this? SOCIAL NETWORKING AND COLLABORATION. Web 3.0. Meaning user accounts, profiles, realtime updates, notifications, videoconferencing and maybe payments. My company built exactly this and more (events, group rides etc.) We are like a more modern Wordpress / Drupal codebase. And we are working on a utility token to monetize the ecosystem See https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform the video there Also see https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token (speaks about how to get from a feudal society to a free market on the Web). Please see this for broader societal implications: https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog (latest article) Look through the articles on that blog for more info.

brokenmachine 7y ago

There are very interesting ways around this, eg with some decentralized architecture supporting coins to pay hosters to host people's data, eg Axiom https://axiom.org/ https://axiom.org/ There's no reason github couldn't exist in a truly decentralized environment where people retain ownership of their data, and also retaining its tiered payment structure. It's just a matter of market forces giving them an incentive to move in such a direction. I believe most people would choose to retain ownership of their data if they could, as long as it's free and zero effort.