4 ms·

so I spill hot coffee on my laptop and brick it I lose my entire Facebook history? Not seeing it really. Centralised _is_ what consumers want, without an gener

so I spill hot coffee on my laptop and brick it I lose my entire Facebook history? Not seeing it really. Centralised _is_ what consumers want, without an generalised and public IT infrastructure for users to handle backups, which we don't have.

jeswin 6y ago
But you don't lose all your code if you spill coffee on it. Similar mechanisms could work here as well. > generalised and public IT infrastructure You don't need public infrastructure for this. There could be free and paid options (similar to Dropbox) to hold your data securely in encrypted form.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago
  I mean public in so far as it just happens without you thinking about it, that could be commercial too, its just more pervasive as public. When such infrastructure becomes a _guaranteed_ aspect of a given operating system. But until then people implicitly _want_ centralised.
  - josephg 6y ago
    One healthy middle ground here is the situation with git. Git is fundamentally decentralized, but I can use it in a centralised way if I want to via services like github, gitlab, bitbucket, etc. Those services allow me to collaborate with other users and back up my projects. And because it’s decentralised, I can trivially move / clone my repository to other providers (or to my own servers) without losing any data. (... Well, except for github issues; which arguably should be stored in repository itself.) I can imagine a similar situation for a small database too. Live clone to Dropbox or something similar. The user gets all the benefits of a centralised system but stays in control, and they can switch providers whenever they want.
    - Quarrelsome 6y ago
      ye but you know in practice that means at least 95% of users are on the centralised version. We continue to build up this 5% of technocracy that have different rules applied to them because they know enough to care.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  That sounds centralized again.

jeswin 6y ago

But you don't lose all your code if you spill coffee on it. Similar mechanisms could work here as well. > generalised and public IT infrastructure You don't need public infrastructure for this. There could be free and paid options (similar to Dropbox) to hold your data securely in encrypted form.

Quarrelsome 6y ago
I mean public in so far as it just happens without you thinking about it, that could be commercial too, its just more pervasive as public. When such infrastructure becomes a _guaranteed_ aspect of a given operating system. But until then people implicitly _want_ centralised.
- josephg 6y ago
  One healthy middle ground here is the situation with git. Git is fundamentally decentralized, but I can use it in a centralised way if I want to via services like github, gitlab, bitbucket, etc. Those services allow me to collaborate with other users and back up my projects. And because it’s decentralised, I can trivially move / clone my repository to other providers (or to my own servers) without losing any data. (... Well, except for github issues; which arguably should be stored in repository itself.) I can imagine a similar situation for a small database too. Live clone to Dropbox or something similar. The user gets all the benefits of a centralised system but stays in control, and they can switch providers whenever they want.
  - Quarrelsome 6y ago
    ye but you know in practice that means at least 95% of users are on the centralised version. We continue to build up this 5% of technocracy that have different rules applied to them because they know enough to care.
pessimizer 6y ago
That sounds centralized again.