5 ms·

Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream? BitTorrent is great but I wouldn’t exactly call it mainstream. I do wish more sites used it for do

Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream? BitTorrent is great but I wouldn’t exactly call it mainstream. I do wish more sites used it for downloads though. I haven’t sat down and researched this, but an argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts?

bawolff 5y ago
The internet? (In the sense you can start/listen to a tcp/ip connection pretty arbitraily. Routing is very distributed). The world wide web (the author complains DNS is too hard...well you dont technically need a domain name) Usenet (was mainstream back in the day) IRC is semi-federated, kind of obscure now, but was a bigger deal back in the day. The author dismisses email, but that seems like an obvious answer. DNS (hierarchical distribution. Depends how you define distributed i suppose) - what's more mainstream than that?
vlmutolo 5y ago
Email definitely counts as a decentralized protocol. Sure, in practice, it's fairly centralized. Most people use Gmail. But you don't have to. That's the key. If for some reason you don't want to use Google's platform, you're 100% free of creating your own mail server. The crazy thing is that it will probably work out just fine. The mail client/server model is really popular. You can go ahead and DIY your email and use all the popular clients without issue (maybe except Gmail? idk). And sure, if you somehow become famous in a way Google doesn't like, they can effectively cut you off from lots of other people by not federating with your email server. In practice, though, this is probably pretty uncommon.
c01n 5y ago
> Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream? www
GuB-42 5y ago
Email is a great example, despite what the article says. You can certainly have email without Google. If fact, Microsoft may actually be bigger in the business world. A lot of large companies also run their own servers, consumers can use icloud, protonmail, yahoo,... or the one from their ISP. The argument in the article is that GMail controls email. It is definitely not true. Email is still how people do business, and business email is not owned by Google.
gpm 5y ago
Blizzard's game launcher (use to?) downloads the games via Torrent. E.g. starcraft II, world of war craft, etc. That's pretty damn mainstream. A lot of older networked games were, probably some modern ones too. One player hosts the game (either picked automatically by the match making system, or by running a game server listed by a index server), and everyone else connects to them. Call of duty, counter strike, starcraft, etc. As other people mentioned the internet, also texting and telephones, but the peers in this example are really big. I think some of the bank transfer stuff is also a "distributed" system with big peers. FireChat (distributed chat over wifi) was reasonably mainstream in Hong Kong for awhile: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/firechat-off-the-grid-messaging-app-what-you-need-to-know-1.2784271 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/firechat-off-the-grid-messag...
- Quiark 5y ago
  HK resident here ... FireChat wasn't mainstream.
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream? People have mentioned email and the Web as examples; I'd also throw in podcasts. (None of these are "apps," per se, but they're all examples from the article, so.) > An argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts? Yes. :) The article makes the point, in so many words, that a lot of decentralized services end up dominated by a small number of major players. I think this is hard to argue with; yes, there are other service providers competing with the big ones, but that doesn't disprove the point. The most recent figures I can find suggest that Gmail had 43% of the email "market" in 2020; that's not more than everyone else combined, but number two is Yahoo (!) at 26%, with third place Outlook (i.e., the email service Microsoft keeps changing the name of, not the client application) trailing at 6%. Many people who might have been bloggers a bit over a decade ago use Medium or, more likely, just Twitter. (I think Twitter did far more to kill the blog than the death of Google Reader, but that's a different topic.) We can go on. Where I think the article gets it wrong isn't in its description of the problem, it's in its diagnosis. Partially. I think the author is right in saying that better tooling isn't the problem, but wrong in saying that the profit motive is in "ensuring decentrialized systems fail." The profit motive is, to borrow your apt phrase, in making centralized systems trusted, available, and resilient. GitHub, Google Workspace, and Slack took over as much of the business world as they did because they're not only easier to set up than doing it yourself, they gain the benefits of a tremendous userbase: they're highly available and resilient, they're well-understood, they have lots of integration plugins. I'd love to see more decentralized/federated systems succeed, but many of them aren't just fiddly and quirky, they're proudly fiddly and quirky. If they're going to take off, we may need to focus less on where we think companies behind centralized services are deviously undermining their decentralized relatives, and focus more on why those services succeeded in the first place.
zzo38computer 5y ago
> ... an argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts? Not necessarily. They will still need an open protocol, good documentation, etc. And even then, it may not be suitable for what you are doing (and yet, they try to use it anyways). Furthermore, it won't necessarily always be available; you cannot predict some things that will go wrong with it. And, you cannot really trust them for sure either, necessarily.

bawolff 5y ago

The internet? (In the sense you can start/listen to a tcp/ip connection pretty arbitraily. Routing is very distributed). The world wide web (the author complains DNS is too hard...well you dont technically need a domain name) Usenet (was mainstream back in the day) IRC is semi-federated, kind of obscure now, but was a bigger deal back in the day. The author dismisses email, but that seems like an obvious answer. DNS (hierarchical distribution. Depends how you define distributed i suppose) - what's more mainstream than that?

vlmutolo 5y ago

Email definitely counts as a decentralized protocol. Sure, in practice, it's fairly centralized. Most people use Gmail. But you don't have to. That's the key. If for some reason you don't want to use Google's platform, you're 100% free of creating your own mail server. The crazy thing is that it will probably work out just fine. The mail client/server model is really popular. You can go ahead and DIY your email and use all the popular clients without issue (maybe except Gmail? idk). And sure, if you somehow become famous in a way Google doesn't like, they can effectively cut you off from lots of other people by not federating with your email server. In practice, though, this is probably pretty uncommon.

c01n 5y ago

> Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream? www

GuB-42 5y ago

Email is a great example, despite what the article says. You can certainly have email without Google. If fact, Microsoft may actually be bigger in the business world. A lot of large companies also run their own servers, consumers can use icloud, protonmail, yahoo,... or the one from their ISP. The argument in the article is that GMail controls email. It is definitely not true. Email is still how people do business, and business email is not owned by Google.

gpm 5y ago

Blizzard's game launcher (use to?) downloads the games via Torrent. E.g. starcraft II, world of war craft, etc. That's pretty damn mainstream. A lot of older networked games were, probably some modern ones too. One player hosts the game (either picked automatically by the match making system, or by running a game server listed by a index server), and everyone else connects to them. Call of duty, counter strike, starcraft, etc. As other people mentioned the internet, also texting and telephones, but the peers in this example are really big. I think some of the bank transfer stuff is also a "distributed" system with big peers. FireChat (distributed chat over wifi) was reasonably mainstream in Hong Kong for awhile: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/firechat-off-the-grid-messaging-app-what-you-need-to-know-1.2784271 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/firechat-off-the-grid-messag...

Quiark 5y ago
HK resident here ... FireChat wasn't mainstream.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

> Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream? People have mentioned email and the Web as examples; I'd also throw in podcasts. (None of these are "apps," per se, but they're all examples from the article, so.) > An argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts? Yes. :) The article makes the point, in so many words, that a lot of decentralized services end up dominated by a small number of major players. I think this is hard to argue with; yes, there are other service providers competing with the big ones, but that doesn't disprove the point. The most recent figures I can find suggest that Gmail had 43% of the email "market" in 2020; that's not more than everyone else combined, but number two is Yahoo (!) at 26%, with third place Outlook (i.e., the email service Microsoft keeps changing the name of, not the client application) trailing at 6%. Many people who might have been bloggers a bit over a decade ago use Medium or, more likely, just Twitter. (I think Twitter did far more to kill the blog than the death of Google Reader, but that's a different topic.) We can go on. Where I think the article gets it wrong isn't in its description of the problem, it's in its diagnosis. Partially. I think the author is right in saying that better tooling isn't the problem, but wrong in saying that the profit motive is in "ensuring decentrialized systems fail." The profit motive is, to borrow your apt phrase, in making centralized systems trusted, available, and resilient. GitHub, Google Workspace, and Slack took over as much of the business world as they did because they're not only easier to set up than doing it yourself, they gain the benefits of a tremendous userbase: they're highly available and resilient, they're well-understood, they have lots of integration plugins. I'd love to see more decentralized/federated systems succeed, but many of them aren't just fiddly and quirky, they're proudly fiddly and quirky. If they're going to take off, we may need to focus less on where we think companies behind centralized services are deviously undermining their decentralized relatives, and focus more on why those services succeeded in the first place.

zzo38computer 5y ago

> ... an argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts? Not necessarily. They will still need an open protocol, good documentation, etc. And even then, it may not be suitable for what you are doing (and yet, they try to use it anyways). Furthermore, it won't necessarily always be available; you cannot predict some things that will go wrong with it. And, you cannot really trust them for sure either, necessarily.