6 ms·

Philosophical arguments to decentralize everything are great, but literally nobody outside of this industry cares. The key to success, ironically, for decentral

by Shank 7y ago

Philosophical arguments to decentralize everything are great, but literally nobody outside of this industry cares. The key to success, ironically, for decentralization, is for everyone to care. The first step is to ship a product people actually want to use that has tangible benefits: right now, every philosophical site like this is dead on arrival because it requires ground swell that doesn't exist without a compelling product.

tastyfreeze 7y ago
I would say the key to decentralization success is making decentralized services that users don't even know are decentralized. As long as using a decentralized service requires more effort than centralized services it will only be enthusiasts using the products.
- chrysoprace 7y ago
  This is crux of the problem with their take-off. A few weeks ago I set up a personal Matrix homeserver and when my non-technical partner asked me what I was working on I didn't even know where to start. She is not computer-illiterate by any means, but being outside the industry, a concept such as federation is completely foreign. Even trying to explain federation to my work colleagues who are in the industry is difficult, because it is such a fundamental shift from the normal web infrastructure.
  - cvwright 7y ago
    I usually just tell people that Matrix works like email. You have your server, and it relays messages back and forth to other people’s servers for you.
    - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
      Do they understand that or do they just hear email as Gmail, say "oh, ok" and go on with their lives?
      - cvwright 7y ago
        I think most people still understand that you can email people on different systems - Hotmail, work accounts, school accounts, etc.
        mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
        They do, but what I think they might not understand is that there is a protocol behind it all that at least theoretically allows for anyone to run their own server without a third party, which I think is the aspect of e-mail that you're trying to call attention to, no? Part of the point that I'm trying to make is that e-mail as it stands today - with the majority of messages going through the servers of a single corporation - isn't all that decentralized in practice. When you mention e-mail to the layperson without additional explanation, what they have in mind is a fairly centralized system.
        cvwright 7y ago
        To be fair, Matrix as it stands today isn't very decentralized either. The dev team reports that their big matrix.org server has something like 40k monthly users. And while there are a ton of tiny little personal homeservers out there, all the action is really happening on matrix.org.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
        Ah, fair enough then. I suppose in this case I may be the one misinterpreting your analogy!
  - mxuribe 7y ago
    This struggle is real! I, too, still get surprised when trying to explain to my work colleagues - who are in the tech industry also. Even when i can get some modicum of understanding from them, they rarely see the point of it all...they're almost totally brainwashed - i see no better term for it than this.
- liamcardenas 7y ago
  In my opinion, even that is not sufficient. In most cases, decentralization will only succeed if its architecture gives a significant advantage over the alternative centralized one. Let’s say you make a social network that people don’t need to know is decentralized. It’s easy to use! Cool, well anyone who has tried to launch a centralized social network will tell you that getting market share is very difficult. A good UX is necessary but not sufficient... you need to outcompete the centralized incumbents. If the decentralized design helps (maybe people like censorship-resistance), then you could succeed. If it doesn’t — and perhaps makes development more difficult — then you are much less likely to gain adoption.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Semi off topic but I strongly suspect that most people would rather use a censored or moderated service. Any entirely uncensored service seems like it would be overrun by scammers, and griefers of all kinds.
    - anchpop 7y ago
      Often you can sort of moderate it yourself based on what you choose to see. Anyone can host a racist site on the internet, but people aren't really turned off from the entire internet by it. Similarly, if there were a racist subreddit, right now that feels weird because reddit is actively hosting it and choosing to allow it. But if there were some kind of decentralized reddit and people made a racist sub on that, I don't think people would view it the same way. As for scammers, imagine something like twitter. If I follow my friends and celebrities I like, scammers will be relegated to the comments section of their tweets (I wouldn't see their actual tweets because I wouldn't follow a scammer). Then you could use some kind of web of trust system to filter the comments - perhaps I would only request comments for people I'm following, or people followed by people I'm following, etc.
      - evgen 7y ago
        Ah, the fallacy of the killfile and transitive reputation. Sorry, but that doesn’t work and has been shown over and over again to not work for large scale communities.
- troquerre 7y ago
  Agreed. Consumers don't care about about implementation details, they just want better experiences. I think this is what most decentralized services miss the mark on. There's an interesting new protocol called Handshake (https://handshake.org https://handshake.org) that's trying to decentralize DNS. The main benefit is that it can improve security by shifting the root of trust in DNS from a certificate authority based system to a distributed network. If you think about traditional DNS, 99% of people using it (everyone on the internet) don't even know that it exists. For Handshake, I think it's possible that millions of people will use it and get the security benefits without knowing it's decentralized.
- sbuttgereit 7y ago
  I think you and the parent post both have captured necessary, but not sufficient, attributes. The problem is that before any of that matters, assuming your goal is mass adoption beyond narrow niches of the already interested, you need to convince people they should care. This is fundamentally marketing and sales, which are the sorts of efforts many people trying to build these things are actively disdainful of. Moreover, who is the messenger to public? The very same decentralization that makes these sorts of solutions interesting actively works against the sort of marketing and sales activities that would get the non-initiated engaged. Fragmented, uncoordinated, and probably just word-of-mouth messaging against well coordinated, well budgeted, and financially motivated opposing interests seem to me to be the bigger hurdles to overcome than assembling the right software or protocols.
wrnr 7y ago
My favourite piece of irony is that one of the first political allies of decentralisation has historically been the Roman Chaotic Church, one of the most hierarchical organisations on earth. During the first industrial revolution it outlined the concept of Distributism[1] in the encyclical (mailinglist) Rerum novarum as a response to the growing social upheaval resulting from the increasing automation of labor and the centralisation of wealth in the hands of the few because of the economics of scale, and the thread this posed to the church. This publication has had a profound impact on society and was a direct influence on the general principle of European Law called Subsidiarity[2] that states that problems are best solved at a local level and only need super-state interference if the local level proofs insufficient. It makes me very skeptical about the direction the EU (and it member states) has taken with its increasing attention to data sovereignty and the host of projects and initiatives it funds in this space: blockchains, edge-computing, digital-twins, privacy-preserving-artificial-intelligence and what-not. The really successful decentralised projects where grass-root affairs, things like torrent, wikipedia and bitcoin, and stand in sharp contrast to the astro-turfing of recent ears where big and powerful institutions have usurped the idea if decentralisation to serve an agenda and to get elected. The Tor network is a counter example because it was funded my the US military, but I'd argue that investigative journalist are better served with a VPN hosted in a jurisdiction with bad diplomatic ties to their respective country of residence (some political awareness is always going to be faster and more convenient than crypto). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
- 1propionyl 7y ago
  > Roman Chaotic Church Wonderful malapropism.
hkt 7y ago
Yep. Add to this that decentralisation introduces engineering challenges that centralisation doesn't and it's abundantly clear why fee decentralised projects work. For my money, I've always believed the right way to make the internet communal again is about ownership, not protocols. I'd much rather be a member of a cooperative messaging app than struggle through the technical issues of a decentralised one. Even if it meant Wikipedia style begging once a year. But that's just me.
mackrevinack 7y ago
the Safe Network is the only one I've seen that would give the average person real motivation to use it - earning money for sharing resources (drive space, cpu cores) with the network - 1 time cost for storing a file (possibly eternally) vs the current recurring subscription - only 1 password needed to access the network vs the current way of every site needing a separate password bear in mind its not even finished so maybe these things won't happen in the end
patrec 7y ago
That's not hard to conceive, mesh networks. It's unbelievable I can't share a picture or video privately, phone to phone, at high speed and convenience, without being at the mercy of a fast and possibly expensive internet connection for both parties to send bytes around half the world to be snooped upon by one or several dystopian outfits. And then back again. Of course first I also have to negotiate joint usage of the same remote service. So here is a very compelling use-case for people who don't care. Sadly it conflicts with the interests of the device maker duopoly.

by Shank 7y ago

tastyfreeze 7y ago

I would say the key to decentralization success is making decentralized services that users don't even know are decentralized. As long as using a decentralized service requires more effort than centralized services it will only be enthusiasts using the products.

chrysoprace 7y ago
This is crux of the problem with their take-off. A few weeks ago I set up a personal Matrix homeserver and when my non-technical partner asked me what I was working on I didn't even know where to start. She is not computer-illiterate by any means, but being outside the industry, a concept such as federation is completely foreign. Even trying to explain federation to my work colleagues who are in the industry is difficult, because it is such a fundamental shift from the normal web infrastructure.
- cvwright 7y ago
  I usually just tell people that Matrix works like email. You have your server, and it relays messages back and forth to other people’s servers for you.
  - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
    Do they understand that or do they just hear email as Gmail, say "oh, ok" and go on with their lives?
    - cvwright 7y ago
      I think most people still understand that you can email people on different systems - Hotmail, work accounts, school accounts, etc.
      - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
        They do, but what I think they might not understand is that there is a protocol behind it all that at least theoretically allows for anyone to run their own server without a third party, which I think is the aspect of e-mail that you're trying to call attention to, no? Part of the point that I'm trying to make is that e-mail as it stands today - with the majority of messages going through the servers of a single corporation - isn't all that decentralized in practice. When you mention e-mail to the layperson without additional explanation, what they have in mind is a fairly centralized system.
        cvwright 7y ago
        To be fair, Matrix as it stands today isn't very decentralized either. The dev team reports that their big matrix.org server has something like 40k monthly users. And while there are a ton of tiny little personal homeservers out there, all the action is really happening on matrix.org.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
        Ah, fair enough then. I suppose in this case I may be the one misinterpreting your analogy!
- mxuribe 7y ago
  This struggle is real! I, too, still get surprised when trying to explain to my work colleagues - who are in the tech industry also. Even when i can get some modicum of understanding from them, they rarely see the point of it all...they're almost totally brainwashed - i see no better term for it than this.
liamcardenas 7y ago
In my opinion, even that is not sufficient. In most cases, decentralization will only succeed if its architecture gives a significant advantage over the alternative centralized one. Let’s say you make a social network that people don’t need to know is decentralized. It’s easy to use! Cool, well anyone who has tried to launch a centralized social network will tell you that getting market share is very difficult. A good UX is necessary but not sufficient... you need to outcompete the centralized incumbents. If the decentralized design helps (maybe people like censorship-resistance), then you could succeed. If it doesn’t — and perhaps makes development more difficult — then you are much less likely to gain adoption.
- duxup 7y ago
  Semi off topic but I strongly suspect that most people would rather use a censored or moderated service. Any entirely uncensored service seems like it would be overrun by scammers, and griefers of all kinds.
  - anchpop 7y ago
    Often you can sort of moderate it yourself based on what you choose to see. Anyone can host a racist site on the internet, but people aren't really turned off from the entire internet by it. Similarly, if there were a racist subreddit, right now that feels weird because reddit is actively hosting it and choosing to allow it. But if there were some kind of decentralized reddit and people made a racist sub on that, I don't think people would view it the same way. As for scammers, imagine something like twitter. If I follow my friends and celebrities I like, scammers will be relegated to the comments section of their tweets (I wouldn't see their actual tweets because I wouldn't follow a scammer). Then you could use some kind of web of trust system to filter the comments - perhaps I would only request comments for people I'm following, or people followed by people I'm following, etc.
    - evgen 7y ago
      Ah, the fallacy of the killfile and transitive reputation. Sorry, but that doesn’t work and has been shown over and over again to not work for large scale communities.
troquerre 7y ago
Agreed. Consumers don't care about about implementation details, they just want better experiences. I think this is what most decentralized services miss the mark on. There's an interesting new protocol called Handshake (https://handshake.org https://handshake.org) that's trying to decentralize DNS. The main benefit is that it can improve security by shifting the root of trust in DNS from a certificate authority based system to a distributed network. If you think about traditional DNS, 99% of people using it (everyone on the internet) don't even know that it exists. For Handshake, I think it's possible that millions of people will use it and get the security benefits without knowing it's decentralized.
sbuttgereit 7y ago
I think you and the parent post both have captured necessary, but not sufficient, attributes. The problem is that before any of that matters, assuming your goal is mass adoption beyond narrow niches of the already interested, you need to convince people they should care. This is fundamentally marketing and sales, which are the sorts of efforts many people trying to build these things are actively disdainful of. Moreover, who is the messenger to public? The very same decentralization that makes these sorts of solutions interesting actively works against the sort of marketing and sales activities that would get the non-initiated engaged. Fragmented, uncoordinated, and probably just word-of-mouth messaging against well coordinated, well budgeted, and financially motivated opposing interests seem to me to be the bigger hurdles to overcome than assembling the right software or protocols.

wrnr 7y ago

My favourite piece of irony is that one of the first political allies of decentralisation has historically been the Roman Chaotic Church, one of the most hierarchical organisations on earth. During the first industrial revolution it outlined the concept of Distributism[1] in the encyclical (mailinglist) Rerum novarum as a response to the growing social upheaval resulting from the increasing automation of labor and the centralisation of wealth in the hands of the few because of the economics of scale, and the thread this posed to the church. This publication has had a profound impact on society and was a direct influence on the general principle of European Law called Subsidiarity[2] that states that problems are best solved at a local level and only need super-state interference if the local level proofs insufficient. It makes me very skeptical about the direction the EU (and it member states) has taken with its increasing attention to data sovereignty and the host of projects and initiatives it funds in this space: blockchains, edge-computing, digital-twins, privacy-preserving-artificial-intelligence and what-not. The really successful decentralised projects where grass-root affairs, things like torrent, wikipedia and bitcoin, and stand in sharp contrast to the astro-turfing of recent ears where big and powerful institutions have usurped the idea if decentralisation to serve an agenda and to get elected. The Tor network is a counter example because it was funded my the US military, but I'd argue that investigative journalist are better served with a VPN hosted in a jurisdiction with bad diplomatic ties to their respective country of residence (some political awareness is always going to be faster and more convenient than crypto). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

1propionyl 7y ago
> Roman Chaotic Church Wonderful malapropism.

hkt 7y ago

Yep. Add to this that decentralisation introduces engineering challenges that centralisation doesn't and it's abundantly clear why fee decentralised projects work. For my money, I've always believed the right way to make the internet communal again is about ownership, not protocols. I'd much rather be a member of a cooperative messaging app than struggle through the technical issues of a decentralised one. Even if it meant Wikipedia style begging once a year. But that's just me.

mackrevinack 7y ago

the Safe Network is the only one I've seen that would give the average person real motivation to use it - earning money for sharing resources (drive space, cpu cores) with the network - 1 time cost for storing a file (possibly eternally) vs the current recurring subscription - only 1 password needed to access the network vs the current way of every site needing a separate password bear in mind its not even finished so maybe these things won't happen in the end

patrec 7y ago

That's not hard to conceive, mesh networks. It's unbelievable I can't share a picture or video privately, phone to phone, at high speed and convenience, without being at the mercy of a fast and possibly expensive internet connection for both parties to send bytes around half the world to be snooped upon by one or several dystopian outfits. And then back again. Of course first I also have to negotiate joint usage of the same remote service. So here is a very compelling use-case for people who don't care. Sadly it conflicts with the interests of the device maker duopoly.