5 ms·
People were fine "running their own servers" back when Skype was peer-to-peer. Or when Team Fortress 2 let you play with your friends.
by freeone3000 4y ago
People were fine "running their own servers" back when Skype was peer-to-peer. Or when Team Fortress 2 let you play with your friends.
- mpeg 4y agoPeople are also fine running their own Discord servers, just like they did IRC channels/networks back in the day.
- freeone3000 4y agoYou're not running discord servers on your own hardware, though. You don't have any of the data locally and it all goes through Discord's server. Actual decentralized services are fine as long as users can run it as easily as they can run a centralized application.
- mpeg 4y agoMost people didn’t run their own irc network either, they just operated a channel and backed up the data themselves.
- WanderPanda 4y agoWait, Skype ain't p2p anymore?
- fami-com 4y agoHasn't been for almost a decade at this point. The p2p protocol was deprecated in mid-2014.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoSkype is also pretty much dead now. So the centralisation argument doesn't really benefit from Skype as an example.
- dane-pgp 4y agoHere is a series of headlines that give the best explanation of this architectural change that I've ever seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779
- px43 4y agoMicrosoft bought it, removed the encryption and decentralization, and started piping conversations directly to the NSA.
- pshc 4y agoYup, honestly this is a good argument for web3 as a substrate on which to build an encrypted chat app that's permanently decentralized and owned/funded by the community. (Once someone figures out the encrypted privacy aspect...)
- Barrin92 4y agobecause there weren't many alternatives. Dropped calls or latency issues were simply the norm and accepted as a trade off for being able to play. The reason companies used to favor p2p was because it was cheaper for them to not run servers. But with people demanding more quality, richer content and consistent and stable connections p2p makes not much sense. Look at some Netflix blogs and how complex their infrastructure is geographically as well as in terms of hardware and software to deliver content at the cost to the user that they do. Division of labor has made sense for hundreds of years and it will continue to do so for many more, the economics of p2p when resources matter doesn't check out.
- freeone3000 4y agoIt's a bad deal for the consumer, though. The complicated Netflix infrastructure is way more robust and stable than SMB+VLC, but I don't need to serve video to millions of people and maintain a complex and rotating streaming library with various publisher contracts determining what shows are available where. I just queue up a show. Division of labor with companies hosting servers for online games makes sense until the servers go away and then what? No more Warcraft III ever, I guess, the servers are gone. When we go in on centralization, we lose availability, privacy, and control. The services are more reliable from a technical sense but less reliable from a social sense.
- topranks 4y agoThe history of all this has shown us people will choose convenience over those other concerns 9 times out of 10.