23 ms·

Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

170 points by agreeahmed 4y ago

ETH_start 4y ago
This criticism of the Ethereum ecosystem also does an excellent job of identifying the forces that undermine decentralization in the long run: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html One reason the blockchain has persisted longer than other decentralized systems is that it introduced economic incentives for maintaining its system. I think this is the best strategy for making decentralized systems that resist the tendency toward centralization while remaining competitive with centralized ones.
pjkundert 4y ago
That is, until the ease, quality and utility of fully decentralized systems exceeds the pain of the fragility and abusiveness of the current centralized offerings. The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs such as Holochain https://holo.host https://holo.host is breathtaking.
- briantakita 4y ago
  > That is, until the ease, quality and utility of fully decentralized systems exceeds the pain of the fragility and abusiveness of the current centralized offerings. I agree. A centralized system will seek to expand to further consolidate control & create cartels which often act against the interests of those outside of the cartel. A system of decentralized components that becomes centralized can be forked to create alternative systems that address the interests of those who maintain the alternative systems. It's like forest garden management technique...using fire to create new growth & biodiversity. The mature forest has less biodiversity & will eventually die out on it's own, but a fire will clear the less "fit" organisms leaving space for new organisms to grow. > The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs such as Holochain https://holo.host https://holo.host is breathtaking. Is the Holochain api/architecture stable or is there still churn?
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  You aren’t addressing the points the article made about efficiency and other selection pressures.
  - agreeahmed 4y ago
    +1 - author argues that some degree of centralization is a natural property of interconnected systems to due the aggregated effects of things like preference attachment and economies of scale.
  - pjkundert 4y ago
    Classic peer-to-peer networks have low connectivity. Scale-free networks are resilient (most nodes don't matter), but are vulnerable to attack (kill a few "hubs"). DHTs (such as underlying Holochain) are scale-free, but also automatically heal from attacks. Most importantly, they operate essentially unimpeded even in the face of successful network partitioning attacks. All while each "agent" (You) retain complete cryptographic control of your data and identity. And, if/when you want to migrate your data (exfiltrate), re-package the functionality (create new clients, or integrate multiple networks), or even completely fork the entire application -- all of this is at your fingertips, and no entity can stop you.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  This seemed like a cool project that actually had a use for a cryptocoin that wasn't pure scamming. Shame it was a scam ponzi anyway
  - pjkundert 4y ago
    Hmm? SDK reaching 1.0.0, almost ready for public beta, and capable of deploying global-scale full-stack Apps without server infrastructure? Perhaps you have it confused with another project.
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      My issues with the project aren't related to the technology, but the rapacious insiders and victims who got ripped off. I know, i know, they're greedy and stupid for getting ripped off but I still feel bad for them and don't like people that do this stuff
Razengan 4y ago
I bet there's a true hive-mind species out there that would disagree.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Even bees centralize around the queen bee.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    I think this is now widely considered to be a false anthropomorphization of what's really going on in a hive.
LatteLazy 4y ago
And yet our economic and social systems have never been more decentralised...
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    In my modern, urban, life I have 1000 different options for my food supply or friendships or housing or employment. Aside from a very unengaged, far away, government there is no centralised entity in my life. And even that I can replace by moving country. 100 years ago, there was one major employer in my area (east London), a few grocers and bakers, people's activities were tightly controlled and linked to family status. Participation in all elements of economic and social life was tightly controlled by a small clique of economic, clerical and political elites. People think about centralisation as a corporate or government thing and a unitary national authority. But it's not. It's part of every later of society. When we lived in tribes, the chief had totally centralised power over almost everything. Villages were the same with an overlord somewhere you'd never see. Towns were lighter but still quite centralised. Modern cities and urban life is about as decentralized as it is possible to be. That's my understanding of centralisation. Sorry it's not better explained.
- gort19 4y ago
  That seems about as far from true as a statement can be. Can you give an example?
- jryhjythtr 4y ago
  Meta and Visa suddenly go permanently offline. What does the social and economic landscape look like now?
  - stickyricky 4y ago
    I go to the bank and get cash. Businesses accept that cash for goods and services. I observe no difference in my social media habits because I do not use Meta products.
humanistbot 4y ago
Tim Wu makes a similar argument in The Master Switch, a history of information networks and monopolies going back to telegraph networks in the 19th century.
- cinquemb 4y ago
  Why stop at the 19th century? It's not like the cost of transmitting information was less expensive before then, nor was it less centralized (people who had the resources/knowledge to propagate such information).
  - humanistbot 4y ago
    The book already was pretty long...
cjtrowbridge 4y ago
Centralization is a prevailing force. There are also many countervailing forces.
photochemsyn 4y ago
That power-law comparison between major freeways and air travel routes is quite misleading, IMO. The highly dense road networks surrounding the major cities (i.e. around Los Angeles, Bay Area, Seattle, Houston, New York-to-Florida, etc.) are left out, but for comparison to air travel they need to be included. Doing so would generate a very different map (with a very different power law). The freeway map shown looks like the major truck-freight corridor for transporting goods (many collected at coast ports from overseas shipping) across the country to warehouses and distribution centers, certainly not what most people use for travel by car. Hence, comparison to air travel doesn't make much sense. As far as centralization and decentralization, for most things this comes down to technological limitations (ignoring the issue of economic monopolies blocking local regions from adopting the latest technologies). Local agriculture and local energy production are a lot easier to maintain (and benefit from no transport costs), than say, local chip foundries. Maybe someday cheap 3D printers capable of spitting out nanoscale RISC-V products in someone's garage will be available, but certainly not anytime soon.
skybrian 4y ago
Nit: Dunbar’s number is casually used in a way that doesn’t seem relevant here. It’s not true that we can only remember about 150 entities. People know many thousands of words. (It is true that there are limits on what people will remember.)
- Retric 4y ago
  Dunbars number relates to remembering relationships between people which is 150 * ~149 things not 150. You might not remember what everyone in the group thinks of everyone else, but keeping track of grudges is often relevant.
  - robocat 4y ago
    It is nowhere near 150 * 149 because people in human networks have different amounts of connectivity, “influencers” with many connections, and others with few connections, as well as cliques with high internal connectivity but low external connectivity. And relationships between influential individuals matter way more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
    - Retric 4y ago
      Influencers are more a function of very large social networks, they don’t really represent small tightly knit communities very well. Consider something like a thanksgiving dinner you have what looks like central figures say a grandparent that everyone is related too, but the grand kids have tighter bonds to their parents than the grandparent. Extend that to a village and you get more social people with more connections across the community, but those aren’t even close to the strongest bonds.
- mellavora 4y ago
  Dunbar's number is that ON AVERAGE people can only maintain 150 relationships. "maintaining relationship" is not the same as remembering or knowing the person's name. It is spending enough time with the person that you have an ongoing relationship, which is eased if you remember a number of details about them (job history, hobbies, birthdays, etc). On average matters because the number is about group size, not any one individual's ability. For the group to cohere, most of the people in the group need to know most of the people in the group. You will find people who can only manage 100 or fewer relationships, likewise, people who can maintain many more, even orders of magnitude more. It isn't about the individual. It is about the group.
padobson 4y ago
It's also worth mentioning that in order to increase your status in any of these networks, you're going to have to serve the central nodes in some way. So if you're trying to grow your social media following, eventually you're going to have to get the attention of an influencer who will in turn rub off some of their influence on you. If you're trying to increase your capital, you're going to need to provide value to some influential capitalist. If you want to increase your political power, you're going to have to be appointed/elected to a role in some powerful political institution.
api 4y ago
Decentralization is sort of a bad term in that it can have very different contextual meanings and the exact meaning is hard to pin down. I like looking at it from a perspective of privacy, ownership/sovereignty, and choice. A system that has a few dominant centralized players that are interchangeable is decentralized as far as I'm concerned. An example would be static web hosting. A system with hosted centralized options but where I can also self-host is also decentralized. An example would be something like GitLab. I want systems where I own and control my own data and where it's not being data mined without my approval. I want systems where someone isn't always looking over my shoulder. I want systems that treat me as the customer not the product.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
"Inevitable" is the last desperate cry of those who have given up thinking.
- mistermann 4y ago
  It can also be caused by people who think in an imperfect manner. Most people think according to how they have been taught to think, not what is perfect. A critical component of a well designed trap: consider all suggestions that you are trapped in an imperfect methodology to be conspiratorial/etc, and therefore false. Checkmate.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    I think I follow you. It's a way to shut down conversation before it's even begun.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      Let's just hope that nothing like that ever happens on this planet!
nicopappl 4y ago
It is true that power laws are seen everywhere, and that there are reason for those. I like the article, because it exposes very quickly a very powerful idea, but I disagree with the conclusion. Information networks are built by humans, they are designed, they are not necessarily bound by the rules of evolution. Which means we may yet be able to find a system that is not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction.
- giantg2 4y ago
  "Information networks are built by humans, they are designed, they are not necessarily bound by the rules of evolution. Which means we may yet be able to find a system that is not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction." Given humanity's track record, destruction and reconstruction seem like a solid bet. Not to mention, systems will require change anywhere nature interacts with it.
- munificent 4y ago
  It's very easy to design a system not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction. The key challenge is that that system, by design, will be less efficient than other competing systems. So if there is a surrounding meta-system that allows it to compete with others, the other systems that tend towards consolidation will drive out your system. It's essentially the same problem we see in economics today with supply chains. Companies that optimized their supply chains to have more margin made more money and won... as long as the supply chains were all running perfectly. But once COVID happened, it became clear that those businesses had no resilience.
  - holler 4y ago
    > Companies that optimized their supply chains to have more margin made more money and won... as long as the supply chains were all running perfectly. But once COVID happened, it became clear that those businesses had no resilience. Good analogy thank you.
Ericson2314 4y ago
The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if they do something fishy. It's about the threat, and what can happen on margin. Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is reasonable.
- k__ 4y ago
  Plus, if these protocols are built on top of cryptographic methods, it might not be so easy for the providers to do something fishy in the first place.
  - npc12345 4y ago
    Sure, Binance could run off with your money tomorrow if they wanted you, but if you keep most of your money in your actual Bitcoin wallet and only deposit what you need to, your money is 100% safe.
    - nico 4y ago
      Big lesson learned from Mtgox. Unfortunately wallets have their cons too, and there are a lot of people who have lost their passwords or thumbdrives and thus access to their crypto. No silver bullet.
      - npc12345 4y ago
      - andirk 4y ago
        Didn't the Mtgox people finally get their BTC back but only after a few years and the price 100x'd ironically? Either way, diversify ones portfolio including where the moneys are kept.
        nico 4y ago
        Don’t know if distribution has happened yet. But there were at least a few investors buying claims, so plenty of people were able to cash out. You could say that’s actually a better outcome than losing your private key.
roschdal 4y ago
Centralisation and decentralization goes in cycles. When we centralized too much, it breaks down, and the cycle repeats.
- kornhole 4y ago
  The pace at which this happens is determined by the barriers and limits of the context. This is why centralists want to have big barriers such as proprietary technology and government backing by laws and other force that protects their monopoly. To create a more dynamic environment in which we can swing back to more decentralized when a central hub becomes too powerful, we need to support communities and open protocols and resist the barriers, laws, and policies that prevent.
  - ece 4y ago
    I can't help but compare to US elections, the higher the bar to vote and less registered voters, the more centralization Republicans can pull off. The only way Democrats can win is if voting and registration are easier and lots of people show up to vote, at least nationally.
seydor 4y ago
the internet is even less constrained than the airport network. With practically zero friction keeping it in check, it can centralize completely. So, we can't put our eggs on decentralization, but instead we should put them on competition. Seemingly however, there is no competitor to silicon valley. And the valley itself is extremely anticompetitive and monopolistic, with different parts of the net being consolidated to a few monopolistic giants. our hope for competing ideas in digital networking are going to come from siloed out ecosystems, like china and russia. Indeed, the cold war was a time of great progress in almost everything
- mistermann 4y ago
  Is it possible to host a site on a Chinese or Russian internet such that it is impossible to be taken down by Western forces?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yes but no, as the Chinese or Russians may be much more likely to take down your site. If the site is supported by the country, it is VERY hard to take down.
  - seydor 4y ago
    I assume so, in russia Of course western governments can block it
kornhole 4y ago
When framed as extremes in a false dichotomy, centralization seems the better option. In the reality of decentralized social media servers, thousands of community servers of various sizes rather than individuals make up most of the nodes and homes for people. In the current #Twittermigration, the biggest general servers are buckling from the mass inflows of members. More servers are easily springing up to provide new homes. The architects and maintainers of the fediverse anticipated the need to make setup and administration easy, but we were maybe not prepared for such a big pulse. Thanks for the boost Elon.
m463 4y ago
You can centralize things... on yourself or your family.
Barrin92 4y ago
Hierarchy and centralization are ways to manage complexity and stay efficient as the article correctly points out but one additional point, topological pressures aside is also division of labour and specialization. Sufficiently large systems benefit more and more from specialization, the emergence of content delivery networks on top of the more generic internet is an example. As the types of content we consume are getting more and more sophisticated, bandwidth heavy and capital intensive, specialized infrastructure and distribution pays off more and more. For that reason peertube and other alternatives are pretty much structurally doomed. They'll never compete or be as economical as services and infrastructure optimized for that task.
BirAdam 4y ago
Centralization and decentralization happen in waves as a natural result of ossification and complexity growth. As an example, IBM was once the dominant market force in computation. As the business grew and became increasingly byzantine, it was unable to respond to market changes or market demands in any meaningful way, and therefore the market became decentralized. This happened to Microsoft. If Apple continues on its current path it will happen to Apple. If Google continues on its current path, this will happen to Google. The entire internet was once significantly decentralized both in structure and in content providers. The content got silo'd by a few major players, and it is now swinging back the opposite direction while the structure is becoming increasingly AWS/Azure/Google. This too will eventually start going the opposite direction as those infrastructure providers ossify. Nothing is forever.
- lob_it 4y ago
  "Most things are not forever" https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-pfas https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-pfas There.. Fixed that for you
  - nuancebydefault 4y ago
    "PFAS chemicals don't break down _easily_ over time"
    - lob_it 4y ago
      I admit, I didn't reseach the thousands of PFAS chems for the joke :p
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
cdata 4y ago
Plug: I'm working with the author on a decentralized protocol for networked thought and a companion browser called Subconscious. We're a very young project and just getting off the ground. If you're interested in topics like the one in the article, all our work is open source and we love getting into it with folks on Github or our Discord (link in the README): https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere
- jessmartin 4y ago
  I've been exploring Noosphere as a protocol-level solution to the dilemma posed here about centralization. Some really interesting tech! Definitely worth checking out if this stuff interests you.
- kitkat_new 4y ago
  yet you choose two closed source centralized solutions for your project: Github and Discord
  - openfuture 4y ago
    Preach yo! the medium is the message.
  - cdata 4y ago
    "We should improve society somewhat..." Seriously though, I would be happy to have a polite discussion about the reason for our choices in our Discord server!
    - openfuture 4y ago
      So make the change. If your idea is strong and has gravity then people will follow (clearly the guy who is working hard with no reward is a FOSS developer ;)
- beefman 4y ago
  Have you considered not asking people to agree to rules before joining your Discord?
kkfx 4y ago
Centralization means easier driver for those who centralize and SPOFs. We centralize anytime we want an easy path even if it's fragile, and always resulting consequences are bad after a short "honeymoon" timeframe. My conclusion then is different: we need common ideas, common tools not centralization. What's wrong with the classic web? Well that information access without search engines was a nightmare, but there is no need of "central" search engines as network hubs. YaCy offer an example FLOSS implementation of a distributed search network whose effectiveness much depend on numbers of indexing peers. In a fully "common web" all who host html pages also participate in the search distributed network and search quality became excellent, than some argue we can also distribute webpages like the ZeroNet idea and a new VERY FAST and VERY EFFECTIVE web is here. Oh, it's utopia just because of big players interests against the most and ignorance of the most, witch is not a technical thing. And that's just an example. Logistic networks are another example where the centralized free scale network is easier than a hub-less network, but fragile, while a hub-less network is hard to keep, especially if not all nodes cooperate, but far more resilient. The same happen in politics with historical absolute monarchy vs democracies and pretty anywhere else. My final reminder: in winter is cold, in summer is hot, sometimes is too dry, sometimes too wet, we human as essentially any living being have tried our best to "mitigate" such natural phenomenon to live better. If certain free-scale networks are a natural thing that does not means we have to accept them without trying to made something better for us.
knaekhoved 4y ago
"The highway network is not scale-free" - no shit, highways refer to roads of a specific size. You're taking a slice out of the road distribution.
MarkPNeyer 4y ago
The author doesn’t understand bitcoin; The pie chart is misleading. All you have to do to see that it is wrong is see how the chart has changed over time. Why isn’t one big mining pool taking all the others? Why did the miners lose the block-size wars?
armchairhacker 4y ago
Centralization is better than decentralization in 99% of cases, but the 1% is really important: when the centralized system fails, or is controlled by an adversary (e.g. malicious government). IMO decentralized internet (and social media and currency) should be possible, routinely tested, and readily-available when the centralized internet fails. But a neutral, trusted, central server will is basically always preferred when it is available.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  > Centralization is better than decentralization in 99% of cases This is way overgeneralizing, and not remotely true for a large swathe of things. Centralized systems are actually less efficient unless the central agent is a party to every interaction due to the nature of the system. If the central agent is only a party by virtue of the imposed structure, you've created overhead, made the system difficult to change, and made it brittle to variance from design assumptions. Decentralized systems can evolve much more rapidly, can survive catastrophic variance, and are more efficient in a large number of cases. Centralizing mail delivery works well, centralizing economies or ecosystems does not.
  - preseinger 4y ago
    > Centralizing mail delivery works well, centralizing economies or ecosystems does not. Take the set of all systems conceivably used by human beings. Email providers, social networks, parent-teacher associations, dungeons and dragons campaign groups, neighborhood watches, everything. Now, classify each of those things into one of two groups: either "more like the USPS" or "more like national economies". What is the ratio of "USPS-alike" groups, versus "national economy-ish" groups? What does the obvious answer to this question -- 100% vs. 0% -- tell you about the relevance of centralization vs. decentralization?
    - CuriouslyC 4y ago
      If you want to define centralization as humans gathering in groups, I guess. A large portion of human social interaction is peer to peer though.
dathinab 4y ago
We centralize because we created/use a economical system where that such system behaviour is promoted. We could also use a system which demotes or outright forbids too much centralization. So it's not inevitable at all. Or at least it isn't if you just look at how people are likely to interpret the title, reading "centralization" as in "central to the whole system". Local increases in "centralization" are normal, e.g. people centralize in cities, but calling that centralization is misleading IMHO. They are local aggregates not central to the whole system. More important if we e.g. look at (biological) nature centralization is nearly always the prelude of collapse and anything more then very localized centralization is often an indication for potential problems. So we probably should change our system to demote too much centralization.
lawrenceyan 4y ago
Oh hey super cool, I think these are what you call small-world networks which show up in a lot of different places. I’m actually reading a chapter right now on the architecture of the brain that talks a lot about this in the context of our neural connections: Chapter 2 or Cycle 2 “Structure Defines Function”[0]. [0]: https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20G.%20Rhythms%20of%20the%20brain.pdf https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
happytiger 4y ago
Centralization is just the impact of digitization. Digitization is inevitable, because efficiencies are tremendous. Then you will have a battle for control of centralization centered on verifiable identity, kyc and centered ultimately around financial system control, which is the center use case of centralized identity platforms. All incentives during this phase are centralization, consolidation and scale. Decentralization efforts will be carefully controlled and excluded by very powerful interests. Financial incentives will prevent meaningful adoption. The carrot will initially be digital money centered on banking directly in the Federal Reserve. Those licenses have been issues for several years and the direction is clear. There is a lot of carrot left to fuel the consolidation phase, and as economic conditions change and global conditions degrade people will embrace centralized solutions in the short term. Then you will have an interruption to the central control systems which will lead to decentralized systems. It will take much longer than people realize for this cycle to play out. We’re still in the consolidation phase. I’m a huge believer in decentralized systems, but like self-driving cars, it’s less of a technology problem and more of an autocratic and powerful interest story.
- openfuture 4y ago
  Sorry but you are full of shit. Centralization is not digitization. Centralization is relying on the use of coercion. It's a /central/ source of truth. The identity system we've been stuck with since WW1 will finally be replaced with something decentralized and approaching fair thanks to digitization. What we're lacking is the software that gives individuals self sovereignty.
  - happytiger 4y ago
    That’s not a very kind response. I’d love to have a constructive conversation rather than resorting to base name calling. I mean to say that centralization is caused by digitization because of the financial incentives, not that centralization IS digitization. And all of our current systems are systems of legacy control. In fact I generally agree with you. Generally the identity system will be interrupted, and at the core digitization of the legacy system will happen. I’m simply saying that there will be further consolidation and centralization first and it will take longer than most people think due to the powerful financial interests involved. To put it in your own words, I generally believe we will have to go through a economics “with the tragedy” before we get to the part where the tragedy gets removed.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
tl;dr Large, centralised networks are better for data collection and advertising than smaller, decentralised ones. Centralisation versus decentralisation should not be an either/or style debate. It is possible to have both types of networks. Each can be valuable in different contexts. For example, we need to have networks for noncommercial purposes as well as commercial ones. Small networks, e.g., L2/3 overlays, managed by their users can be useful for noncommercial purposes. Large networks managed by central third party authorities can be useful for commercial purposes. With respect to noncommercial internetworks, one lesson of The Internet is that large scales ones are inherently disadvantaged. Besides the problem of proprietary, non-compatible protocols mentioned in the top comment, centralised "infinite scale" networks also become infested with "tech" companies, commercial intermediaries, who usurp them as honeypots for commercial and political advertisers.^1 On "The Internet", noncommercial network use, e.g., communicating with friends and family, is being compromised for commercial purposes by a relatively small number of single, central authority websites. Hundreds of millions of people with small networks of friends and family, e.g., less than 100 nodes, are being unecessarily intermediated by central "hubs" that collect data and serve targeted advertising and/or sell advertising services. If those smaller networks were not connected nor managed by a third parties, then the attraction of injecting advertising into peoples' noncommercial internet use falls dramatically. The incentive for, and feasibiity of, data collection is similarly reduced. Those are features, not bugs. Whereas for commercial uses, e.g., sales of goods and services, inter-business communications, etc., small networks are far less valuable. For these applications, we need networks that scale to large sizes. Arguably that utility has already been proven as successful. Advertising and data collection may be appropriate in the commercial context. 1. The irony is that The Internet was supposed to be a means of disintermediation. In some contexts, that is true. In others, it has allowed for the greatest level of intermediation in history.
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
Whenever people use those words by themselves, it sounds like they don't have much information but are trying to form some conversation anyway. Centralization and its opposite are extremely general concepts. You can't have a conversation about them because they mean nothing without specific context. Adding "the internet " or "the web" doesn't help because they're very vague too. It's like talking about "drinks" versus "not-drinks".
water8 4y ago
wslh 4y ago
It is much simpler to explain that in this article: centralization is inevitable because the UI/UX you use for entering any protocol (decentralized or not) is centralized. Hence the UI/UX could decide what to show and the order. It could be call "the listing problem", you can decentralize Amazon (e.g. OpenBazaar) but at the end the app you use to list the product could censor and filter what they want without caring about the protocol behind.
aidenn0 4y ago
I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. I would, in fact, be only mildly surprised to see e-mail become much less federated than it is today (which is much less federated than it was 20 years ago). Spam (and other bad actors) is one huge, and obvious, reason why; it's led to a significant consolidation in e-mail as well; SMTP delivery is hit-or-miss these days, and you can get ahold of a person to fix it only if you are "big enough" The web plays a big part in this too. You can continuously deliver a client that updates its protocol in lock-step with the backend. This makes alternative clients something hard to do, and if you can't separate the client from the service, then it significantly increases the friction to change. Eudora didn't care which e-mail server it connected to, and you could take Eudora with you when you got a new ISP and lost your old e-mail address. How much of my monthly fees to fastmail is spent on delivering e-mail, and how much of it is "keeping up with the gmail webclient"? I suspect it's more on the latter than the former.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  > I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. This is one of the smartest things I've read in a long, long time. It seems deceptively simple or shallow, but it's not. At least once or twice a year, for the past ~15 years or so, I reflect on how the email protocol has survived and thrived despite numerous attempts at "reinventing email" and such.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    In one sense it's simple and shallow, but I feel like it needs to be said. In a way it's like saying "we won't have a baseball team as good as the 1939 Yankees in my lifetime" in the sense that e-mail is the '39 Yankees of federated protocols. On the other hand a lot of boosters for various new federated protocols want to compare their pet project to the '39 Yankees when they it's more like the 2021 Orioles.
  - jbn 4y ago
    .. and it's funny how a system where there are no guarantees of delivery (people email to reach their inbox in seconds, but the delivery time is not guaranteed at all, nor is delivery!), no privacy (IMHO most emails are transported in plain text and one only needs to sniff the traffic..), and no guarantee of authenticity (you can send an email with any "FROM" address, pretty much), well how a system like that can in fact be incredibly useful. Of course, the layman thinks all these things are in fact guaranteed...
hoseja 4y ago
It's literally just this haha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(painting...

170 points by agreeahmed 4y ago

This criticism of the Ethereum ecosystem also does an excellent job of identifying the forces that undermine decentralization in the long run: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html One reason the blockchain has persisted longer than other decentralized systems is that it introduced economic incentives for maintaining its system. I think this is the best strategy for making decentralized systems that resist the tendency toward centralization while remaining competitive with centralized ones.

pjkundert 4y ago

That is, until the ease, quality and utility of fully decentralized systems exceeds the pain of the fragility and abusiveness of the current centralized offerings. The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs such as Holochain https://holo.host https://holo.host is breathtaking.

briantakita 4y ago
> That is, until the ease, quality and utility of fully decentralized systems exceeds the pain of the fragility and abusiveness of the current centralized offerings. I agree. A centralized system will seek to expand to further consolidate control & create cartels which often act against the interests of those outside of the cartel. A system of decentralized components that becomes centralized can be forked to create alternative systems that address the interests of those who maintain the alternative systems. It's like forest garden management technique...using fire to create new growth & biodiversity. The mature forest has less biodiversity & will eventually die out on it's own, but a fire will clear the less "fit" organisms leaving space for new organisms to grow. > The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs such as Holochain https://holo.host https://holo.host is breathtaking. Is the Holochain api/architecture stable or is there still churn?
jeremyjh 4y ago
You aren’t addressing the points the article made about efficiency and other selection pressures.
- agreeahmed 4y ago
  +1 - author argues that some degree of centralization is a natural property of interconnected systems to due the aggregated effects of things like preference attachment and economies of scale.
- pjkundert 4y ago
  Classic peer-to-peer networks have low connectivity. Scale-free networks are resilient (most nodes don't matter), but are vulnerable to attack (kill a few "hubs"). DHTs (such as underlying Holochain) are scale-free, but also automatically heal from attacks. Most importantly, they operate essentially unimpeded even in the face of successful network partitioning attacks. All while each "agent" (You) retain complete cryptographic control of your data and identity. And, if/when you want to migrate your data (exfiltrate), re-package the functionality (create new clients, or integrate multiple networks), or even completely fork the entire application -- all of this is at your fingertips, and no entity can stop you.
snapcaster 4y ago
This seemed like a cool project that actually had a use for a cryptocoin that wasn't pure scamming. Shame it was a scam ponzi anyway
- pjkundert 4y ago
  Hmm? SDK reaching 1.0.0, almost ready for public beta, and capable of deploying global-scale full-stack Apps without server infrastructure? Perhaps you have it confused with another project.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    My issues with the project aren't related to the technology, but the rapacious insiders and victims who got ripped off. I know, i know, they're greedy and stupid for getting ripped off but I still feel bad for them and don't like people that do this stuff

Razengan 4y ago

I bet there's a true hive-mind species out there that would disagree.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Even bees centralize around the queen bee.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  I think this is now widely considered to be a false anthropomorphization of what's really going on in a hive.

LatteLazy 4y ago

And yet our economic and social systems have never been more decentralised...

andsoitis 4y ago
Can you elaborate?
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  In my modern, urban, life I have 1000 different options for my food supply or friendships or housing or employment. Aside from a very unengaged, far away, government there is no centralised entity in my life. And even that I can replace by moving country. 100 years ago, there was one major employer in my area (east London), a few grocers and bakers, people's activities were tightly controlled and linked to family status. Participation in all elements of economic and social life was tightly controlled by a small clique of economic, clerical and political elites. People think about centralisation as a corporate or government thing and a unitary national authority. But it's not. It's part of every later of society. When we lived in tribes, the chief had totally centralised power over almost everything. Villages were the same with an overlord somewhere you'd never see. Towns were lighter but still quite centralised. Modern cities and urban life is about as decentralized as it is possible to be. That's my understanding of centralisation. Sorry it's not better explained.
gort19 4y ago
That seems about as far from true as a statement can be. Can you give an example?
jryhjythtr 4y ago
Meta and Visa suddenly go permanently offline. What does the social and economic landscape look like now?
- stickyricky 4y ago
  I go to the bank and get cash. Businesses accept that cash for goods and services. I observe no difference in my social media habits because I do not use Meta products.

humanistbot 4y ago

Tim Wu makes a similar argument in The Master Switch, a history of information networks and monopolies going back to telegraph networks in the 19th century.

cinquemb 4y ago
Why stop at the 19th century? It's not like the cost of transmitting information was less expensive before then, nor was it less centralized (people who had the resources/knowledge to propagate such information).
- humanistbot 4y ago
  The book already was pretty long...

cjtrowbridge 4y ago

Centralization is a prevailing force. There are also many countervailing forces.

photochemsyn 4y ago

That power-law comparison between major freeways and air travel routes is quite misleading, IMO. The highly dense road networks surrounding the major cities (i.e. around Los Angeles, Bay Area, Seattle, Houston, New York-to-Florida, etc.) are left out, but for comparison to air travel they need to be included. Doing so would generate a very different map (with a very different power law). The freeway map shown looks like the major truck-freight corridor for transporting goods (many collected at coast ports from overseas shipping) across the country to warehouses and distribution centers, certainly not what most people use for travel by car. Hence, comparison to air travel doesn't make much sense. As far as centralization and decentralization, for most things this comes down to technological limitations (ignoring the issue of economic monopolies blocking local regions from adopting the latest technologies). Local agriculture and local energy production are a lot easier to maintain (and benefit from no transport costs), than say, local chip foundries. Maybe someday cheap 3D printers capable of spitting out nanoscale RISC-V products in someone's garage will be available, but certainly not anytime soon.

skybrian 4y ago

Nit: Dunbar’s number is casually used in a way that doesn’t seem relevant here. It’s not true that we can only remember about 150 entities. People know many thousands of words. (It is true that there are limits on what people will remember.)

Retric 4y ago
Dunbars number relates to remembering relationships between people which is 150 * ~149 things not 150. You might not remember what everyone in the group thinks of everyone else, but keeping track of grudges is often relevant.
- robocat 4y ago
  It is nowhere near 150 * 149 because people in human networks have different amounts of connectivity, “influencers” with many connections, and others with few connections, as well as cliques with high internal connectivity but low external connectivity. And relationships between influential individuals matter way more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
  - Retric 4y ago
    Influencers are more a function of very large social networks, they don’t really represent small tightly knit communities very well. Consider something like a thanksgiving dinner you have what looks like central figures say a grandparent that everyone is related too, but the grand kids have tighter bonds to their parents than the grandparent. Extend that to a village and you get more social people with more connections across the community, but those aren’t even close to the strongest bonds.
mellavora 4y ago
Dunbar's number is that ON AVERAGE people can only maintain 150 relationships. "maintaining relationship" is not the same as remembering or knowing the person's name. It is spending enough time with the person that you have an ongoing relationship, which is eased if you remember a number of details about them (job history, hobbies, birthdays, etc). On average matters because the number is about group size, not any one individual's ability. For the group to cohere, most of the people in the group need to know most of the people in the group. You will find people who can only manage 100 or fewer relationships, likewise, people who can maintain many more, even orders of magnitude more. It isn't about the individual. It is about the group.

padobson 4y ago

It's also worth mentioning that in order to increase your status in any of these networks, you're going to have to serve the central nodes in some way. So if you're trying to grow your social media following, eventually you're going to have to get the attention of an influencer who will in turn rub off some of their influence on you. If you're trying to increase your capital, you're going to need to provide value to some influential capitalist. If you want to increase your political power, you're going to have to be appointed/elected to a role in some powerful political institution.

api 4y ago

Decentralization is sort of a bad term in that it can have very different contextual meanings and the exact meaning is hard to pin down. I like looking at it from a perspective of privacy, ownership/sovereignty, and choice. A system that has a few dominant centralized players that are interchangeable is decentralized as far as I'm concerned. An example would be static web hosting. A system with hosted centralized options but where I can also self-host is also decentralized. An example would be something like GitLab. I want systems where I own and control my own data and where it's not being data mined without my approval. I want systems where someone isn't always looking over my shoulder. I want systems that treat me as the customer not the product.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

"Inevitable" is the last desperate cry of those who have given up thinking.

mistermann 4y ago
It can also be caused by people who think in an imperfect manner. Most people think according to how they have been taught to think, not what is perfect. A critical component of a well designed trap: consider all suggestions that you are trapped in an imperfect methodology to be conspiratorial/etc, and therefore false. Checkmate.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I think I follow you. It's a way to shut down conversation before it's even begun.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Let's just hope that nothing like that ever happens on this planet!

nicopappl 4y ago

It is true that power laws are seen everywhere, and that there are reason for those. I like the article, because it exposes very quickly a very powerful idea, but I disagree with the conclusion. Information networks are built by humans, they are designed, they are not necessarily bound by the rules of evolution. Which means we may yet be able to find a system that is not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction.

giantg2 4y ago
"Information networks are built by humans, they are designed, they are not necessarily bound by the rules of evolution. Which means we may yet be able to find a system that is not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction." Given humanity's track record, destruction and reconstruction seem like a solid bet. Not to mention, systems will require change anywhere nature interacts with it.
munificent 4y ago
It's very easy to design a system not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction. The key challenge is that that system, by design, will be less efficient than other competing systems. So if there is a surrounding meta-system that allows it to compete with others, the other systems that tend towards consolidation will drive out your system. It's essentially the same problem we see in economics today with supply chains. Companies that optimized their supply chains to have more margin made more money and won... as long as the supply chains were all running perfectly. But once COVID happened, it became clear that those businesses had no resilience.
- holler 4y ago
  > Companies that optimized their supply chains to have more margin made more money and won... as long as the supply chains were all running perfectly. But once COVID happened, it became clear that those businesses had no resilience. Good analogy thank you.

Ericson2314 4y ago

The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if they do something fishy. It's about the threat, and what can happen on margin. Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is reasonable.

k__ 4y ago
Plus, if these protocols are built on top of cryptographic methods, it might not be so easy for the providers to do something fishy in the first place.
- npc12345 4y ago
  Sure, Binance could run off with your money tomorrow if they wanted you, but if you keep most of your money in your actual Bitcoin wallet and only deposit what you need to, your money is 100% safe.
  - nico 4y ago
    Big lesson learned from Mtgox. Unfortunately wallets have their cons too, and there are a lot of people who have lost their passwords or thumbdrives and thus access to their crypto. No silver bullet.
    - npc12345 4y ago
    - andirk 4y ago
      Didn't the Mtgox people finally get their BTC back but only after a few years and the price 100x'd ironically? Either way, diversify ones portfolio including where the moneys are kept.
      - nico 4y ago
        Don’t know if distribution has happened yet. But there were at least a few investors buying claims, so plenty of people were able to cash out. You could say that’s actually a better outcome than losing your private key.

roschdal 4y ago

Centralisation and decentralization goes in cycles. When we centralized too much, it breaks down, and the cycle repeats.

kornhole 4y ago
The pace at which this happens is determined by the barriers and limits of the context. This is why centralists want to have big barriers such as proprietary technology and government backing by laws and other force that protects their monopoly. To create a more dynamic environment in which we can swing back to more decentralized when a central hub becomes too powerful, we need to support communities and open protocols and resist the barriers, laws, and policies that prevent.
- ece 4y ago
  I can't help but compare to US elections, the higher the bar to vote and less registered voters, the more centralization Republicans can pull off. The only way Democrats can win is if voting and registration are easier and lots of people show up to vote, at least nationally.

seydor 4y ago

the internet is even less constrained than the airport network. With practically zero friction keeping it in check, it can centralize completely. So, we can't put our eggs on decentralization, but instead we should put them on competition. Seemingly however, there is no competitor to silicon valley. And the valley itself is extremely anticompetitive and monopolistic, with different parts of the net being consolidated to a few monopolistic giants. our hope for competing ideas in digital networking are going to come from siloed out ecosystems, like china and russia. Indeed, the cold war was a time of great progress in almost everything

mistermann 4y ago
Is it possible to host a site on a Chinese or Russian internet such that it is impossible to be taken down by Western forces?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yes but no, as the Chinese or Russians may be much more likely to take down your site. If the site is supported by the country, it is VERY hard to take down.
- seydor 4y ago
  I assume so, in russia Of course western governments can block it

kornhole 4y ago

When framed as extremes in a false dichotomy, centralization seems the better option. In the reality of decentralized social media servers, thousands of community servers of various sizes rather than individuals make up most of the nodes and homes for people. In the current #Twittermigration, the biggest general servers are buckling from the mass inflows of members. More servers are easily springing up to provide new homes. The architects and maintainers of the fediverse anticipated the need to make setup and administration easy, but we were maybe not prepared for such a big pulse. Thanks for the boost Elon.

m463 4y ago

You can centralize things... on yourself or your family.

Barrin92 4y ago

Hierarchy and centralization are ways to manage complexity and stay efficient as the article correctly points out but one additional point, topological pressures aside is also division of labour and specialization. Sufficiently large systems benefit more and more from specialization, the emergence of content delivery networks on top of the more generic internet is an example. As the types of content we consume are getting more and more sophisticated, bandwidth heavy and capital intensive, specialized infrastructure and distribution pays off more and more. For that reason peertube and other alternatives are pretty much structurally doomed. They'll never compete or be as economical as services and infrastructure optimized for that task.

BirAdam 4y ago

Centralization and decentralization happen in waves as a natural result of ossification and complexity growth. As an example, IBM was once the dominant market force in computation. As the business grew and became increasingly byzantine, it was unable to respond to market changes or market demands in any meaningful way, and therefore the market became decentralized. This happened to Microsoft. If Apple continues on its current path it will happen to Apple. If Google continues on its current path, this will happen to Google. The entire internet was once significantly decentralized both in structure and in content providers. The content got silo'd by a few major players, and it is now swinging back the opposite direction while the structure is becoming increasingly AWS/Azure/Google. This too will eventually start going the opposite direction as those infrastructure providers ossify. Nothing is forever.

lob_it 4y ago
"Most things are not forever" https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-pfas https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-pfas There.. Fixed that for you
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  "PFAS chemicals don't break down _easily_ over time"
  - lob_it 4y ago
    I admit, I didn't reseach the thousands of PFAS chems for the joke :p
edmcnulty101 4y ago

cdata 4y ago

Plug: I'm working with the author on a decentralized protocol for networked thought and a companion browser called Subconscious. We're a very young project and just getting off the ground. If you're interested in topics like the one in the article, all our work is open source and we love getting into it with folks on Github or our Discord (link in the README): https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere

jessmartin 4y ago
I've been exploring Noosphere as a protocol-level solution to the dilemma posed here about centralization. Some really interesting tech! Definitely worth checking out if this stuff interests you.
kitkat_new 4y ago
yet you choose two closed source centralized solutions for your project: Github and Discord
- openfuture 4y ago
  Preach yo! the medium is the message.
- cdata 4y ago
  "We should improve society somewhat..." Seriously though, I would be happy to have a polite discussion about the reason for our choices in our Discord server!
  - openfuture 4y ago
    So make the change. If your idea is strong and has gravity then people will follow (clearly the guy who is working hard with no reward is a FOSS developer ;)
beefman 4y ago
Have you considered not asking people to agree to rules before joining your Discord?

kkfx 4y ago

Centralization means easier driver for those who centralize and SPOFs. We centralize anytime we want an easy path even if it's fragile, and always resulting consequences are bad after a short "honeymoon" timeframe. My conclusion then is different: we need common ideas, common tools not centralization. What's wrong with the classic web? Well that information access without search engines was a nightmare, but there is no need of "central" search engines as network hubs. YaCy offer an example FLOSS implementation of a distributed search network whose effectiveness much depend on numbers of indexing peers. In a fully "common web" all who host html pages also participate in the search distributed network and search quality became excellent, than some argue we can also distribute webpages like the ZeroNet idea and a new VERY FAST and VERY EFFECTIVE web is here. Oh, it's utopia just because of big players interests against the most and ignorance of the most, witch is not a technical thing. And that's just an example. Logistic networks are another example where the centralized free scale network is easier than a hub-less network, but fragile, while a hub-less network is hard to keep, especially if not all nodes cooperate, but far more resilient. The same happen in politics with historical absolute monarchy vs democracies and pretty anywhere else. My final reminder: in winter is cold, in summer is hot, sometimes is too dry, sometimes too wet, we human as essentially any living being have tried our best to "mitigate" such natural phenomenon to live better. If certain free-scale networks are a natural thing that does not means we have to accept them without trying to made something better for us.

knaekhoved 4y ago

"The highway network is not scale-free" - no shit, highways refer to roads of a specific size. You're taking a slice out of the road distribution.

MarkPNeyer 4y ago

The author doesn’t understand bitcoin; The pie chart is misleading. All you have to do to see that it is wrong is see how the chart has changed over time. Why isn’t one big mining pool taking all the others? Why did the miners lose the block-size wars?

armchairhacker 4y ago

Centralization is better than decentralization in 99% of cases, but the 1% is really important: when the centralized system fails, or is controlled by an adversary (e.g. malicious government). IMO decentralized internet (and social media and currency) should be possible, routinely tested, and readily-available when the centralized internet fails. But a neutral, trusted, central server will is basically always preferred when it is available.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
> Centralization is better than decentralization in 99% of cases This is way overgeneralizing, and not remotely true for a large swathe of things. Centralized systems are actually less efficient unless the central agent is a party to every interaction due to the nature of the system. If the central agent is only a party by virtue of the imposed structure, you've created overhead, made the system difficult to change, and made it brittle to variance from design assumptions. Decentralized systems can evolve much more rapidly, can survive catastrophic variance, and are more efficient in a large number of cases. Centralizing mail delivery works well, centralizing economies or ecosystems does not.
- preseinger 4y ago
  > Centralizing mail delivery works well, centralizing economies or ecosystems does not. Take the set of all systems conceivably used by human beings. Email providers, social networks, parent-teacher associations, dungeons and dragons campaign groups, neighborhood watches, everything. Now, classify each of those things into one of two groups: either "more like the USPS" or "more like national economies". What is the ratio of "USPS-alike" groups, versus "national economy-ish" groups? What does the obvious answer to this question -- 100% vs. 0% -- tell you about the relevance of centralization vs. decentralization?
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    If you want to define centralization as humans gathering in groups, I guess. A large portion of human social interaction is peer to peer though.

dathinab 4y ago

We centralize because we created/use a economical system where that such system behaviour is promoted. We could also use a system which demotes or outright forbids too much centralization. So it's not inevitable at all. Or at least it isn't if you just look at how people are likely to interpret the title, reading "centralization" as in "central to the whole system". Local increases in "centralization" are normal, e.g. people centralize in cities, but calling that centralization is misleading IMHO. They are local aggregates not central to the whole system. More important if we e.g. look at (biological) nature centralization is nearly always the prelude of collapse and anything more then very localized centralization is often an indication for potential problems. So we probably should change our system to demote too much centralization.

lawrenceyan 4y ago

Oh hey super cool, I think these are what you call small-world networks which show up in a lot of different places. I’m actually reading a chapter right now on the architecture of the brain that talks a lot about this in the context of our neural connections: Chapter 2 or Cycle 2 “Structure Defines Function”[0]. [0]: https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20G.%20Rhythms%20of%20the%20brain.pdf https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...

happytiger 4y ago

Centralization is just the impact of digitization. Digitization is inevitable, because efficiencies are tremendous. Then you will have a battle for control of centralization centered on verifiable identity, kyc and centered ultimately around financial system control, which is the center use case of centralized identity platforms. All incentives during this phase are centralization, consolidation and scale. Decentralization efforts will be carefully controlled and excluded by very powerful interests. Financial incentives will prevent meaningful adoption. The carrot will initially be digital money centered on banking directly in the Federal Reserve. Those licenses have been issues for several years and the direction is clear. There is a lot of carrot left to fuel the consolidation phase, and as economic conditions change and global conditions degrade people will embrace centralized solutions in the short term. Then you will have an interruption to the central control systems which will lead to decentralized systems. It will take much longer than people realize for this cycle to play out. We’re still in the consolidation phase. I’m a huge believer in decentralized systems, but like self-driving cars, it’s less of a technology problem and more of an autocratic and powerful interest story.

openfuture 4y ago
Sorry but you are full of shit. Centralization is not digitization. Centralization is relying on the use of coercion. It's a /central/ source of truth. The identity system we've been stuck with since WW1 will finally be replaced with something decentralized and approaching fair thanks to digitization. What we're lacking is the software that gives individuals self sovereignty.
- happytiger 4y ago
  That’s not a very kind response. I’d love to have a constructive conversation rather than resorting to base name calling. I mean to say that centralization is caused by digitization because of the financial incentives, not that centralization IS digitization. And all of our current systems are systems of legacy control. In fact I generally agree with you. Generally the identity system will be interrupted, and at the core digitization of the legacy system will happen. I’m simply saying that there will be further consolidation and centralization first and it will take longer than most people think due to the powerful financial interests involved. To put it in your own words, I generally believe we will have to go through a economics “with the tragedy” before we get to the part where the tragedy gets removed.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

tl;dr Large, centralised networks are better for data collection and advertising than smaller, decentralised ones. Centralisation versus decentralisation should not be an either/or style debate. It is possible to have both types of networks. Each can be valuable in different contexts. For example, we need to have networks for noncommercial purposes as well as commercial ones. Small networks, e.g., L2/3 overlays, managed by their users can be useful for noncommercial purposes. Large networks managed by central third party authorities can be useful for commercial purposes. With respect to noncommercial internetworks, one lesson of The Internet is that large scales ones are inherently disadvantaged. Besides the problem of proprietary, non-compatible protocols mentioned in the top comment, centralised "infinite scale" networks also become infested with "tech" companies, commercial intermediaries, who usurp them as honeypots for commercial and political advertisers.^1 On "The Internet", noncommercial network use, e.g., communicating with friends and family, is being compromised for commercial purposes by a relatively small number of single, central authority websites. Hundreds of millions of people with small networks of friends and family, e.g., less than 100 nodes, are being unecessarily intermediated by central "hubs" that collect data and serve targeted advertising and/or sell advertising services. If those smaller networks were not connected nor managed by a third parties, then the attraction of injecting advertising into peoples' noncommercial internet use falls dramatically. The incentive for, and feasibiity of, data collection is similarly reduced. Those are features, not bugs. Whereas for commercial uses, e.g., sales of goods and services, inter-business communications, etc., small networks are far less valuable. For these applications, we need networks that scale to large sizes. Arguably that utility has already been proven as successful. Advertising and data collection may be appropriate in the commercial context. 1. The irony is that The Internet was supposed to be a means of disintermediation. In some contexts, that is true. In others, it has allowed for the greatest level of intermediation in history.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

Whenever people use those words by themselves, it sounds like they don't have much information but are trying to form some conversation anyway. Centralization and its opposite are extremely general concepts. You can't have a conversation about them because they mean nothing without specific context. Adding "the internet " or "the web" doesn't help because they're very vague too. It's like talking about "drinks" versus "not-drinks".

water8 4y ago

wslh 4y ago

It is much simpler to explain that in this article: centralization is inevitable because the UI/UX you use for entering any protocol (decentralized or not) is centralized. Hence the UI/UX could decide what to show and the order. It could be call "the listing problem", you can decentralize Amazon (e.g. OpenBazaar) but at the end the app you use to list the product could censor and filter what they want without caring about the protocol behind.

aidenn0 4y ago

I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. I would, in fact, be only mildly surprised to see e-mail become much less federated than it is today (which is much less federated than it was 20 years ago). Spam (and other bad actors) is one huge, and obvious, reason why; it's led to a significant consolidation in e-mail as well; SMTP delivery is hit-or-miss these days, and you can get ahold of a person to fix it only if you are "big enough" The web plays a big part in this too. You can continuously deliver a client that updates its protocol in lock-step with the backend. This makes alternative clients something hard to do, and if you can't separate the client from the service, then it significantly increases the friction to change. Eudora didn't care which e-mail server it connected to, and you could take Eudora with you when you got a new ISP and lost your old e-mail address. How much of my monthly fees to fastmail is spent on delivering e-mail, and how much of it is "keeping up with the gmail webclient"? I suspect it's more on the latter than the former.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago
> I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. This is one of the smartest things I've read in a long, long time. It seems deceptively simple or shallow, but it's not. At least once or twice a year, for the past ~15 years or so, I reflect on how the email protocol has survived and thrived despite numerous attempts at "reinventing email" and such.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  In one sense it's simple and shallow, but I feel like it needs to be said. In a way it's like saying "we won't have a baseball team as good as the 1939 Yankees in my lifetime" in the sense that e-mail is the '39 Yankees of federated protocols. On the other hand a lot of boosters for various new federated protocols want to compare their pet project to the '39 Yankees when they it's more like the 2021 Orioles.
- jbn 4y ago
  .. and it's funny how a system where there are no guarantees of delivery (people email to reach their inbox in seconds, but the delivery time is not guaranteed at all, nor is delivery!), no privacy (IMHO most emails are transported in plain text and one only needs to sniff the traffic..), and no guarantee of authenticity (you can send an email with any "FROM" address, pretty much), well how a system like that can in fact be incredibly useful. Of course, the layman thinks all these things are in fact guaranteed...

hoseja 4y ago

It's literally just this haha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(painting...