5 ms·

Time to decentralize everything

by johndevor 6y ago

nostromo 6y ago
It’s not fully decentralized, but I’d love to see Signal take on some Twitter and Facebook use cases.
- kawfey 6y ago
  I would reckon that if Signal were to take over these use cases, Signal itself would just turn into the next big tech baddie.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  It's 0% decentralized. Banning the president on Signal would not be hard.
  - Daniel_sk 6y ago
    Signal is not a social platform. It's meant for 1:1 or small groups communication (there is a hard limit of members in conversation) as if people met in real life. We can't compare it. Trump would not be able to use it the same way as social platforms, the same way he can't go and talk to every person.
ajconway 6y ago
Banning (or, more precisely, disturbing operation of) a decentralized service is much easier than a big, important centralized one. You just need to obtain the DNS names or IP addresses of the nodes the same way everyone else does — by participating in the network. This way you can even selectively ban the "bad" nodes. Banning a centralized service like gmail is easier, but then you lose in productivity as 90% of your country's businesses are likely to rely on it. As far as privacy goes, it's also easier to coerce admins of smaller nodes to disclose valuable information than fighting with a multinational foreign corporation. This is not an argument against decentralization. It's just not immediately obvious that decentralization does not automatically lead to censorship resistance. To do that we need onion routing or mix networks as a base for all our communications, so that banning the network would be equivalent to disconnecting the ISP from the Internet altogether.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > You just need to obtain the DNS names or IP addresses of the nodes the same way everyone else does — by participating in the network. Not if such network was made purposefully to minimize transparency.
  - ajconway 6y ago
    I don't see how this can be done without anonymization techniques like the onion routing. If you can think of one, please share.
- CivBase 6y ago
  Wouldn't you also have to keep searching for and squashing content mirrors all the time? That seems like a pretty big investment to me.
  - ajconway 6y ago
    Correct, but so will the users until one of the sides gives up.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  Your argument seems to depend on the idea that centralized services are inherently more popular than decentralized services, which isn’t necessarily true. To say that it’s “much easier” to ban hundreds of IP addresses instead of a dozen IP addresses is ridiculous. It’s no easier to get IP addresses in a distributed system than it is to get them in a centralized system. GMail is a funny example to point to, because email is arguably the most used digital communication method and it’s also decentralized. Try to fully shut down email in the US — where are you going to find a list of all ip addresses hosting SMTP and IMAP servers, and is that going to be easier than just blocking Twitter?
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    > Where are you going to find a list of all ip addresses hosting SMTP and IMAP servers? Shodan is a readily available database of such data. Just search for all hosts with IMAP, SMTP and POP3 ports exposed and then block those. Alternatively, a DIY scan of the whole IPv4 address range can be accomplished within hours or days. IPv6 address space is harder to scan, but it's arguably safe to ban all such traffic since nearly nothing critical uses IPv6.
itake 6y ago
We can either have the ability to ban people like Trump or we can’t.
root_axis 6y ago
The internet is already decentralized, the masses willingly choose to use the same handful of sites.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  There are already decentralized Twitter-esque alternatives, but they are hardly used, because without centralization no one is making money, and thus it cannot be advertised to the same magnitude.

Time to decentralize everything

nostromo 6y ago

It’s not fully decentralized, but I’d love to see Signal take on some Twitter and Facebook use cases.

kawfey 6y ago
I would reckon that if Signal were to take over these use cases, Signal itself would just turn into the next big tech baddie.
im3w1l 6y ago
It's 0% decentralized. Banning the president on Signal would not be hard.
- Daniel_sk 6y ago
  Signal is not a social platform. It's meant for 1:1 or small groups communication (there is a hard limit of members in conversation) as if people met in real life. We can't compare it. Trump would not be able to use it the same way as social platforms, the same way he can't go and talk to every person.

ajconway 6y ago

Banning (or, more precisely, disturbing operation of) a decentralized service is much easier than a big, important centralized one. You just need to obtain the DNS names or IP addresses of the nodes the same way everyone else does — by participating in the network. This way you can even selectively ban the "bad" nodes. Banning a centralized service like gmail is easier, but then you lose in productivity as 90% of your country's businesses are likely to rely on it. As far as privacy goes, it's also easier to coerce admins of smaller nodes to disclose valuable information than fighting with a multinational foreign corporation. This is not an argument against decentralization. It's just not immediately obvious that decentralization does not automatically lead to censorship resistance. To do that we need onion routing or mix networks as a base for all our communications, so that banning the network would be equivalent to disconnecting the ISP from the Internet altogether.

baybal2 6y ago
> You just need to obtain the DNS names or IP addresses of the nodes the same way everyone else does — by participating in the network. Not if such network was made purposefully to minimize transparency.
- ajconway 6y ago
  I don't see how this can be done without anonymization techniques like the onion routing. If you can think of one, please share.
CivBase 6y ago
Wouldn't you also have to keep searching for and squashing content mirrors all the time? That seems like a pretty big investment to me.
- ajconway 6y ago
  Correct, but so will the users until one of the sides gives up.
nickysielicki 6y ago
Your argument seems to depend on the idea that centralized services are inherently more popular than decentralized services, which isn’t necessarily true. To say that it’s “much easier” to ban hundreds of IP addresses instead of a dozen IP addresses is ridiculous. It’s no easier to get IP addresses in a distributed system than it is to get them in a centralized system. GMail is a funny example to point to, because email is arguably the most used digital communication method and it’s also decentralized. Try to fully shut down email in the US — where are you going to find a list of all ip addresses hosting SMTP and IMAP servers, and is that going to be easier than just blocking Twitter?
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  > Where are you going to find a list of all ip addresses hosting SMTP and IMAP servers? Shodan is a readily available database of such data. Just search for all hosts with IMAP, SMTP and POP3 ports exposed and then block those. Alternatively, a DIY scan of the whole IPv4 address range can be accomplished within hours or days. IPv6 address space is harder to scan, but it's arguably safe to ban all such traffic since nearly nothing critical uses IPv6.

itake 6y ago

We can either have the ability to ban people like Trump or we can’t.

root_axis 6y ago

The internet is already decentralized, the masses willingly choose to use the same handful of sites.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
There are already decentralized Twitter-esque alternatives, but they are hardly used, because without centralization no one is making money, and thus it cannot be advertised to the same magnitude.