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A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all; the centralized systems are easier to sign up for and use. It's been demonstrate

A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all; the centralized systems are easier to sign up for and use. It's been demonstrated over and over and over again. Even if the underlying tech is decentralized, the community will settle around one or a few big instances (for example, Gmail and GitHub) which often end up having significant control over the trajectory of the entire ecosystem. If you run your own email server and you get put onto Google's spam list - you're fucked.

tedivm 3y ago
>If you run your own email server and you get put onto Google's spam list - you're fucked. It's even worse than that- I ran my own email server, and for some reason gmail delayed any emails from their system to outside of their system. That meant that people would send me an email but I wouldn't get it for 20 minutes. These delays don't exist when using big email providers (it stopped being a problem when I switched to Fastmail, for example) but if you're running a small server Google makes it a nightmare.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I have run my own email server off a Linode for the last decade-plus, and I have never encountered this. Most of the people with whom I correspond (I run my own business from my server) are on Gmail, and I have always received their emails instantly. If you were getting emails only 20 minutes later, I wonder if there was some server misconfiguration on your end, e.g. sending messages into graylisting delays.
- dataflow 3y ago
  I assume you didn't have anything in between Gmail and your setup? Like a forwarding layer or something?
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  Sounds like you need to allowlist google from your grey list. They have a long retry on their side. Once you tell a server to 'go away, come back later' it is really up to the server to decide when or if to retry. Additionally, If they use multiple sending IPs, you can end up grey listing again and again before they try back with a good ip. You'd either need to allowlist the big providers sending blocks or just drop grey listing all together.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    My gray list behaves like this. It's seldom a problem in practice, but new senders may need a "warm-up".
  - tedivm 3y ago
    I completely disabled greylisting to try and resolve that, but it is another good point on why gmail kind of sucks for people not on gmail.
    - jethro_tell 3y ago
      So you accepted their mail on first contact? And first contact was 20 min after sent header timestamp?
elondaits 3y ago
Decentralized software is not the only alternative. A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  > A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”. If it's better why isn't that how these sites are run? Wikipedia for example is an anomaly.
  - solardev 3y ago
    They're hard to capitalize. You need a skilled founder willing to forego profits, or a group of well intentioned devs with management experience, to organize the business side of things. You have to figure out non investment sources of income (charge for services, donations, etc. maybe no ads or at least no ad networks if you're worried about privacy or ethics). It's a lot of work, especially trying to scale that up to where you can actually pay employees salaries and benefits. It's one thing to have an open source model for software that doesn't necessarily need that level of official organization, but once you start getting into backend infra costs, you can't run that on volunteer labor alone, you eventually have to fundraise for infra costs. If only there were a public or community driven internet... it's too bad the peer to peer models (federation, torrents, etc.) don't work well for real time global communications. Centralized messages are much easier to read and write to. That doesn't mean such a model can't work or isn't good, it's just much harder, and all for no profit motive. Realistically I could see a bunch of ex FANGers pooling income into a worker owned coop and starting a tech collective, then maybe handing it over to a 501c3 at some point or just keep it going as a private company without outside shareholders. But someone had to organize all that, and it's not the traditional strong suit of devs. Fingers crossed though. Would love to see something like that happen.
    - arp242 3y ago
      The difficulty now is that you'll have to compete against Stack Overflow, whereas Stack Overflow had to compete with the paywalled Experts Exchange. Both for-profit and non-profit will have a very hard time unless Stack Overflow really goes off the rails in Quora-style it will probably stick around. Also I think people underestimate how much effort goes in to moderating Stack Overflow, and how delicate the entire system is. There's already a whole bunch of Open Source Q&A software out there and I'm sure one of them will work fine, that's not really the hard part, and managing servers is also "just" a matter of spending time. Moderating and managing it all is much harder and more time-consuming; there are people whose ability to hold down a job or finish their homework quite literally depends on being to ask questions on Stack Overflow: there's a lot of incentive to abuse the crap out of it, more so than many other sites.
sschueller 3y ago
I disagree, it worked before and it is the reason the internet even exists. The core issue is that user generated data is owned by one individual company. There are existing system that don't have this issues e.g. Usenet or bittorrent. We don't need to idiot proof the web. There are enough people to gather some place for a social network even if it's hard to use. The others can stay and will stay on reddit anyway until one day when they also had enough and learn to use some alternative.
- Zetice 3y ago
  The "value" of Reddit as a website is vastly overrated anyway. There's nothing on Reddit that can't be obtained elsewhere, folks just get stuck in patterns that are familiar and presume it's because options are limited. The world will continue to spin without Reddit, or if Reddit isn't popular anymore, or if Reddit kicks all of its current users out, and so on.
  - nukeman 3y ago
    Reddit’s value these days is as a super-forum. Instead of needing five logins and five accounts for separate hobbies, you can have one login, one account, and if you occasionally want to comment or ask questions about something else, you can do so without having to create another account. Doesn’t hurt that Reddit has a very good network effect.
    - Zetice 3y ago
      That's how you use it, but I'd argue that 90% of Reddit's users don't operate the same way, considering they don't even have accounts to begin with. In fact, I would even argue that Reddit is actively trying to push users who use Reddit this way off of the platform, as they're not as easily monetized. Reddit is notorious for having low conversion rates on its ads and extremely high ad blocking rates.
      - jcpham2 3y ago
        I'm definitely a push-away user. I'll never pay them money to use their site and I rarely comment in the ten years or so I've had an account. Same goes for HN; I would never pay money to use this site - I would just find a new site to frequent. I understand this is unfortunate for the website operator but I consider operating a web server at this point a labor of love, not a business model.
benrutter 3y ago
I don't know that I agree. I think most people don't care about decentralization but they do care about the effects it brings. Email is a great example where most people wouldn't be interested in a version of email that only let's you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation network is a clear value add that people care about. The main issue from my perspective is that we only have a select few large tech companies that operate as monopolies so are effectively able to block out new decentralized protocols from coming to be. RCS messaging is a great example which I think most people would use over alternatives like WhatsApp and Imessage except that apple refusing to support it locks a huge fraction of the market out and stops widespread adoption being possible. I don't think it's a question of preference, or people being uninterested. It's just a boring and repeated story of corporate monopolies intentionally reducing consumer choice.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  > I don't think it's a question of preference, or people being uninterested. It's just a boring and repeated story of corporate monopolies intentionally reducing consumer choice. not really. nothing at all is stopping one from starting a new social network that's federated. the issue is users have no reason to move. it's more a question of incentives, and there's basically none to use something that you're not already using unless it's better, heavily advertised or you're simply paid to.
- slg 3y ago
  >Email is a great example where most people wouldn't be interested in a version of email that only let's you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation network is a clear value add that people care about. That is only because those technologies predate those companies. Normal people don't care that you can't DM a Reddit user on Twitter or that your Instagram posts don't automatically show up on your Facebook page. People are generally fine with centralized corporate platforms as long as it isn't a restriction of a previously free technology and the network effect has done its thing to attract enough people to the platform.
JohnFen 3y ago
> A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all Maybe, maybe not. It's worth a shot, though, isn't it?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Between gmail and your own email server, there are thousands of medium size email providers that work ok, so email is a bad example, decentralization still works there. As for GitHub, the coders of all people should have known better than to pile into one site and sell their s̶o̶u̶l̶s̶ code to devil for a little bit of convenience.
- ilyt 3y ago
  It does because e-mail is not a social network. You don't "join" a gmail to see social streams of posts. There is no penalty or friction to start with some small e-mail provider.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
…but how necessary are those 99% for the viability of the new system? Perhaps we're better off without them.
erlend_sh 3y ago
Only one percent of users need to care about decentralization for it to work sufficiently well as a safety net and equalizer.
jzb 3y ago
"It's been demonstrated over and over and over again." Well, yes. But it's also been demonstrated over and over again the risks of centralized sites. Maybe, just maybe, one of these days that lesson will stick and communities will take a longer term view. It seems like the cycle is happening a bit faster each time now, so maybe folks will get tired of the "damn, time to move to another site, again..." thing. Or not. Convenience tends to trump lots of other considerations most of the time.
dahwolf 3y ago
It's worse. Even in case users did care about decentralization, such solutions are less reliable, not more. Subjective moderation, rule changes, rug pulls.

tedivm 3y ago

>If you run your own email server and you get put onto Google's spam list - you're fucked. It's even worse than that- I ran my own email server, and for some reason gmail delayed any emails from their system to outside of their system. That meant that people would send me an email but I wouldn't get it for 20 minutes. These delays don't exist when using big email providers (it stopped being a problem when I switched to Fastmail, for example) but if you're running a small server Google makes it a nightmare.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
I have run my own email server off a Linode for the last decade-plus, and I have never encountered this. Most of the people with whom I correspond (I run my own business from my server) are on Gmail, and I have always received their emails instantly. If you were getting emails only 20 minutes later, I wonder if there was some server misconfiguration on your end, e.g. sending messages into graylisting delays.
dataflow 3y ago
I assume you didn't have anything in between Gmail and your setup? Like a forwarding layer or something?
jethro_tell 3y ago
Sounds like you need to allowlist google from your grey list. They have a long retry on their side. Once you tell a server to 'go away, come back later' it is really up to the server to decide when or if to retry. Additionally, If they use multiple sending IPs, you can end up grey listing again and again before they try back with a good ip. You'd either need to allowlist the big providers sending blocks or just drop grey listing all together.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  My gray list behaves like this. It's seldom a problem in practice, but new senders may need a "warm-up".
- tedivm 3y ago
  I completely disabled greylisting to try and resolve that, but it is another good point on why gmail kind of sucks for people not on gmail.
  - jethro_tell 3y ago
    So you accepted their mail on first contact? And first contact was 20 min after sent header timestamp?

elondaits 3y ago

Decentralized software is not the only alternative. A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”.

endisneigh 3y ago
> A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”. If it's better why isn't that how these sites are run? Wikipedia for example is an anomaly.
- solardev 3y ago
  They're hard to capitalize. You need a skilled founder willing to forego profits, or a group of well intentioned devs with management experience, to organize the business side of things. You have to figure out non investment sources of income (charge for services, donations, etc. maybe no ads or at least no ad networks if you're worried about privacy or ethics). It's a lot of work, especially trying to scale that up to where you can actually pay employees salaries and benefits. It's one thing to have an open source model for software that doesn't necessarily need that level of official organization, but once you start getting into backend infra costs, you can't run that on volunteer labor alone, you eventually have to fundraise for infra costs. If only there were a public or community driven internet... it's too bad the peer to peer models (federation, torrents, etc.) don't work well for real time global communications. Centralized messages are much easier to read and write to. That doesn't mean such a model can't work or isn't good, it's just much harder, and all for no profit motive. Realistically I could see a bunch of ex FANGers pooling income into a worker owned coop and starting a tech collective, then maybe handing it over to a 501c3 at some point or just keep it going as a private company without outside shareholders. But someone had to organize all that, and it's not the traditional strong suit of devs. Fingers crossed though. Would love to see something like that happen.
  - arp242 3y ago
    The difficulty now is that you'll have to compete against Stack Overflow, whereas Stack Overflow had to compete with the paywalled Experts Exchange. Both for-profit and non-profit will have a very hard time unless Stack Overflow really goes off the rails in Quora-style it will probably stick around. Also I think people underestimate how much effort goes in to moderating Stack Overflow, and how delicate the entire system is. There's already a whole bunch of Open Source Q&A software out there and I'm sure one of them will work fine, that's not really the hard part, and managing servers is also "just" a matter of spending time. Moderating and managing it all is much harder and more time-consuming; there are people whose ability to hold down a job or finish their homework quite literally depends on being to ask questions on Stack Overflow: there's a lot of incentive to abuse the crap out of it, more so than many other sites.

sschueller 3y ago

I disagree, it worked before and it is the reason the internet even exists. The core issue is that user generated data is owned by one individual company. There are existing system that don't have this issues e.g. Usenet or bittorrent. We don't need to idiot proof the web. There are enough people to gather some place for a social network even if it's hard to use. The others can stay and will stay on reddit anyway until one day when they also had enough and learn to use some alternative.

Zetice 3y ago
The "value" of Reddit as a website is vastly overrated anyway. There's nothing on Reddit that can't be obtained elsewhere, folks just get stuck in patterns that are familiar and presume it's because options are limited. The world will continue to spin without Reddit, or if Reddit isn't popular anymore, or if Reddit kicks all of its current users out, and so on.
- nukeman 3y ago
  Reddit’s value these days is as a super-forum. Instead of needing five logins and five accounts for separate hobbies, you can have one login, one account, and if you occasionally want to comment or ask questions about something else, you can do so without having to create another account. Doesn’t hurt that Reddit has a very good network effect.
  - Zetice 3y ago
    That's how you use it, but I'd argue that 90% of Reddit's users don't operate the same way, considering they don't even have accounts to begin with. In fact, I would even argue that Reddit is actively trying to push users who use Reddit this way off of the platform, as they're not as easily monetized. Reddit is notorious for having low conversion rates on its ads and extremely high ad blocking rates.
    - jcpham2 3y ago
      I'm definitely a push-away user. I'll never pay them money to use their site and I rarely comment in the ten years or so I've had an account. Same goes for HN; I would never pay money to use this site - I would just find a new site to frequent. I understand this is unfortunate for the website operator but I consider operating a web server at this point a labor of love, not a business model.

benrutter 3y ago

I don't know that I agree. I think most people don't care about decentralization but they do care about the effects it brings. Email is a great example where most people wouldn't be interested in a version of email that only let's you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation network is a clear value add that people care about. The main issue from my perspective is that we only have a select few large tech companies that operate as monopolies so are effectively able to block out new decentralized protocols from coming to be. RCS messaging is a great example which I think most people would use over alternatives like WhatsApp and Imessage except that apple refusing to support it locks a huge fraction of the market out and stops widespread adoption being possible. I don't think it's a question of preference, or people being uninterested. It's just a boring and repeated story of corporate monopolies intentionally reducing consumer choice.

endisneigh 3y ago
> I don't think it's a question of preference, or people being uninterested. It's just a boring and repeated story of corporate monopolies intentionally reducing consumer choice. not really. nothing at all is stopping one from starting a new social network that's federated. the issue is users have no reason to move. it's more a question of incentives, and there's basically none to use something that you're not already using unless it's better, heavily advertised or you're simply paid to.
slg 3y ago
>Email is a great example where most people wouldn't be interested in a version of email that only let's you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation network is a clear value add that people care about. That is only because those technologies predate those companies. Normal people don't care that you can't DM a Reddit user on Twitter or that your Instagram posts don't automatically show up on your Facebook page. People are generally fine with centralized corporate platforms as long as it isn't a restriction of a previously free technology and the network effect has done its thing to attract enough people to the platform.

JohnFen 3y ago

> A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all Maybe, maybe not. It's worth a shot, though, isn't it?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Between gmail and your own email server, there are thousands of medium size email providers that work ok, so email is a bad example, decentralization still works there. As for GitHub, the coders of all people should have known better than to pile into one site and sell their s̶o̶u̶l̶s̶ code to devil for a little bit of convenience.

ilyt 3y ago
It does because e-mail is not a social network. You don't "join" a gmail to see social streams of posts. There is no penalty or friction to start with some small e-mail provider.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

…but how necessary are those 99% for the viability of the new system? Perhaps we're better off without them.

erlend_sh 3y ago

Only one percent of users need to care about decentralization for it to work sufficiently well as a safety net and equalizer.

jzb 3y ago

"It's been demonstrated over and over and over again." Well, yes. But it's also been demonstrated over and over again the risks of centralized sites. Maybe, just maybe, one of these days that lesson will stick and communities will take a longer term view. It seems like the cycle is happening a bit faster each time now, so maybe folks will get tired of the "damn, time to move to another site, again..." thing. Or not. Convenience tends to trump lots of other considerations most of the time.

dahwolf 3y ago

It's worse. Even in case users did care about decentralization, such solutions are less reliable, not more. Subjective moderation, rule changes, rug pulls.