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Nobody cares about [de]centralization, for more than 99 % of all internet users it does not matter whether the internet is the internet or a single server sitti

Nobody cares about [de]centralization, for more than 99 % of all internet users it does not matter whether the internet is the internet or a single server sitting in someone's basement. They want to use services - chat, write mails, watch videos, have a website, buy stuff, sell stuff - not run infrastructure of any kind. So nobody is going to have their own servers, they will all use existing services. And because it is easy to switch, everyone will be using the best - for some definition of best, could be easy to use, cheap, functional, ... - service and everyone else will go out of business. That also makes the internet simpler, there is one place for one kind of service and everyone else will also be there. And this does not only apply to end-users, the move of IT into the cloud is fundamentally the same thing, nobody wants to run the infrastructure. You can maybe argue that everyone has their preferences wrong and they are hurting themselves in the long run, but good luck fighting that battle.

linuxandrew 3y ago
I do agree that 99% of users don't want to run infrastructure. I think there's a difference between Fediverse-style federation/decentralisation and true P2P/BitTorrent-esque dectralisation. BitTorrent, in its current iteration, does have many semi-technical users, but perhaps your grandparents would struggle to use it. I think a much more friendly UX could be built; maintaining its decentralised properties would be more difficult but not inconceivably so. I actually think transparent decentralisation is possible but the current policy settings (copyright, surveillance and advertising) somewhat disincentivise people from working on it, to the extent that most of the current projects are hobbies, crowdsourced or funded by research grants.
the8472 3y ago
They don't care when it works. Then they get locked out of their google account and lose a lot of things at once and only have few alternatives to choose from and may return google yet again due to lack of choice. > You can maybe argue that everyone has their preferences wrong and they are hurting themselves in the long run, but good luck fighting that battle. That battle has been won many times. We don't let people run blind into open knives in many contexts.
- danbruc 3y ago
  I mean there is of course a way to fight and win that battle and it is regulation, write things like interoperability and data portability into law and enforce it. I was more thinking of things that can be done without enforcement in the initial comment.
  - idle_zealot 3y ago
    >write things like interoperability and data portability into law This would be nice for sure, but I think the solution could be even simpler than that. The only successful way these centalized service platforms have managed to monetize is by gross privacy violations in support of pervasive advertising. Strong privacy laws would essentially outlaw their business models and leave a hole that a network of decentralized hobbyist services would fill.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
> And because it is easy to switch, everyone will be using the best But it's not easy to switch. E-mail was easy to switch "back then", when you didn't have a bunch of accounts tied to them. IRC was easy to switch, because most of the servers were interconnected into a few large networks, and all the clients used the same protocol. And now? Your grandma only knows how to use whatsapp? Well, you're not switching away from that, and facebook is getting all your data.
- danbruc 3y ago
  You are not switching away from WhatsApp because that is what everyone is using, not because it would be harder to use Signal.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    But it's not 'everyone', it's just grandma. Auntie is using Viber. Grandpa from the other side is using google hangouts (chat? something). And your cousin is using telegram. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/worldwide-messaging-apps/ https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/wor... Just look at the map of most popular messengers worldwide, it's not just one.
    - danbruc 3y ago
      For most people it does not matter what people are using at the other end of the world, they will use the locally dominant platform.
    - Tomte 3y ago
      Most people don't have friends on other continents. At least for Germany I can confidently say that there is nothing (except rounding error) besides WhatsApp. No matter the demographic. I have never experienced a debate which messenger to use, and I have joined about twelve study-related group chats over the last two years. Same for personal messages. Some people have Signal or Telegram installed. After two or three messages for the novelty factor, everybody is back on WhatsApp. Because that app is open all the time.
lynx23 3y ago
While we are so damn real, it is the same with climate change. 99% of people dont care if the product they buy have bad CO2 emission stats or not. All they care about is the product, the price, and the use they want to put it to. Nobody really cares about the rest. If you can buy it in a store, people will do so.
flir 3y ago
I'll go a step further: any theoretical benefit that decentralization has (except ownership) can be emulated by a centralized architecture. That said, I'm looking forward to reading this RFC when I get a chance. I hope there's some good ideas in it. I think we're heading for a two-tier internet, though, in many ways. Look at the post yesterday about a facebook drenched in AI-generated dog sculptures.
- austin-cheney 3y ago
  This has never proven true in practice. There is so much people are not willing to communicate when third parties are present. This is why the behaviors and availability of features are wildly different on closed networks versus the web.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > any theoretical benefit that decentralization has (except ownership) can be emulated by a centralized architecture. One thing decentralised designs are much better at is: turning a blind eye to stigmatised and illegal activities. Such as pornography, piracy, reproductive rights, gun rights, criticism of the Chinese government, and so on.
  - flir 3y ago
    I think that's a second order effect of ownership. You'll bring the same heat down on yourself (eventually) if you use a distributed protocol but rent your server from Amazon. Therefore I think it's ownership of the hardware that is the defence against censorship, not the protocol you use.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I feel the 99% part is important to repeat regularly among tech savvy groups: we are the fleetingly small exception. Most users don’t know and don’t care when it comes to the technical merits of implementation.
mattwilsonn888 3y ago
Decentralization is about enabling builders - users get the indirect benefits which follow. What you have done is justified 'everything under the sun' so long as it technically operates in a free market. But the ability for users to switch does not guarantee that the incentives to compete are at all healthy or robust. You are correct when you say centralization affects users indirectly and they will simply use services which are most immediately convenient. But competition is not giving users much benefit because every centralized service has a monopoly on their instantiation - it's not like you can make a few tweaks and give everyone a moderately better experience - you have to start from scratch and make yet another siloed and extractive platform for any and every improvement. And then if you do they can easily copy you back before you build a fraction of their momentum. X isn't going to let you improve the experience and just take users; they're going to say: "Have fun building up user trust and security infrastructure - also you're never getting our users." That's the difference between a protocol and a platform. The reason companies build platforms is because they need to fund infrastructure and opsec at scale so they effectively need to build monopoly protocols i.e. 'platforms.' So "switching is easy" is meaningless. Building successful competing platforms is, by design, very difficult; it takes large investments and huge risks and a lot of rebuilding what's already been done just for the sake of catching up to platforms who have obvious incentives and built-in methods to discourage competition via their tight, centralized structure. Even if the platform is better, it will probably fail relative to its predecessor. Decentralization most directly helps builders. If the basic requirements of a service are sufficiently decentralized security, networking, front-ends, then a builder who wants to compete via small (or any sized) improvements *does not need to rebuild the entire service.* Small builders who would otherwise not have access to startup capital, risk tolerance, or excessive build-hours would be equally able to compete because their decentralized access to the basic requirements cannot be locked behind an extractive economic scheme. Imagine every talented programmer making open source software could leverage it atop secure, robust and interoperable networks. And they could earn money from it. There is a massive difference between being a passive proponent of the free market and a maximalist for market competition. Your justification for the state of the field is a passive retreat to free-market capitalism. Users certainly have the ability to choose, but there are all sorts of schemes and situations in a free market where competition is choked. Honest proponents of decentralization are maximizers of opportunities for competition - they recognize that the free market is a gradient and not some binary quality which automatically imbues every operation inside it with good accountability.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
soulofmischief 3y ago
Few people seem to care about the environment either, or the exploited foreign worker class despite their impact on humanity, and besides it would be really hard to fight that battle, so we should just be apathetic and carry on with business as usual.
- danbruc 3y ago
  No, but those are battles that require political solutions, nothing you can realistically hope to address with recommendations.
mycall 3y ago
> chat, write mails, watch videos, have a website, buy stuff, sell stuff Why can't every computer do this without servers? It sounds like a ridiculous idea but it can't be impossible to achieve. My 24 core laptop has more power than my 4 core server.
- danbruc 3y ago
  If everyone runs their computer 24/7 or if you are willing to live with the limitation that somebody can only write you an email when your computer is turned on, then you can do that. And of course if everyone runs their computer 24/7 and exposes it to the internet, then we are back where we started, everyone runs, maintains, patches, and secures their own servers. Which nobody wants to do even if they were capable to do so, which they are not.
  - elevation 3y ago
    Email already supports delivery to destinations which are intermittently connected. The legacy MTA behavior is to retry automatically every few hours for several days, with failure resulting in a notification to the sender. Operators have adjusted the behavior over the years to support grey-listing so the retry period and interval are both shorter -- but still in use! While communication between two hosts which are rarely simultaneously connected is best facilitated by a third party, some tweaks to your MTA's the delivery retry interval and period could enable reliable communications between email users who are connected simultaneously on a regular basis.

linuxandrew 3y ago

I do agree that 99% of users don't want to run infrastructure. I think there's a difference between Fediverse-style federation/decentralisation and true P2P/BitTorrent-esque dectralisation. BitTorrent, in its current iteration, does have many semi-technical users, but perhaps your grandparents would struggle to use it. I think a much more friendly UX could be built; maintaining its decentralised properties would be more difficult but not inconceivably so. I actually think transparent decentralisation is possible but the current policy settings (copyright, surveillance and advertising) somewhat disincentivise people from working on it, to the extent that most of the current projects are hobbies, crowdsourced or funded by research grants.

the8472 3y ago

They don't care when it works. Then they get locked out of their google account and lose a lot of things at once and only have few alternatives to choose from and may return google yet again due to lack of choice. > You can maybe argue that everyone has their preferences wrong and they are hurting themselves in the long run, but good luck fighting that battle. That battle has been won many times. We don't let people run blind into open knives in many contexts.

danbruc 3y ago
I mean there is of course a way to fight and win that battle and it is regulation, write things like interoperability and data portability into law and enforce it. I was more thinking of things that can be done without enforcement in the initial comment.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  >write things like interoperability and data portability into law This would be nice for sure, but I think the solution could be even simpler than that. The only successful way these centalized service platforms have managed to monetize is by gross privacy violations in support of pervasive advertising. Strong privacy laws would essentially outlaw their business models and leave a hole that a network of decentralized hobbyist services would fill.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

> And because it is easy to switch, everyone will be using the best But it's not easy to switch. E-mail was easy to switch "back then", when you didn't have a bunch of accounts tied to them. IRC was easy to switch, because most of the servers were interconnected into a few large networks, and all the clients used the same protocol. And now? Your grandma only knows how to use whatsapp? Well, you're not switching away from that, and facebook is getting all your data.

danbruc 3y ago
You are not switching away from WhatsApp because that is what everyone is using, not because it would be harder to use Signal.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  But it's not 'everyone', it's just grandma. Auntie is using Viber. Grandpa from the other side is using google hangouts (chat? something). And your cousin is using telegram. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/worldwide-messaging-apps/ https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/wor... Just look at the map of most popular messengers worldwide, it's not just one.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    For most people it does not matter what people are using at the other end of the world, they will use the locally dominant platform.
  - Tomte 3y ago
    Most people don't have friends on other continents. At least for Germany I can confidently say that there is nothing (except rounding error) besides WhatsApp. No matter the demographic. I have never experienced a debate which messenger to use, and I have joined about twelve study-related group chats over the last two years. Same for personal messages. Some people have Signal or Telegram installed. After two or three messages for the novelty factor, everybody is back on WhatsApp. Because that app is open all the time.

lynx23 3y ago

While we are so damn real, it is the same with climate change. 99% of people dont care if the product they buy have bad CO2 emission stats or not. All they care about is the product, the price, and the use they want to put it to. Nobody really cares about the rest. If you can buy it in a store, people will do so.

flir 3y ago

I'll go a step further: any theoretical benefit that decentralization has (except ownership) can be emulated by a centralized architecture. That said, I'm looking forward to reading this RFC when I get a chance. I hope there's some good ideas in it. I think we're heading for a two-tier internet, though, in many ways. Look at the post yesterday about a facebook drenched in AI-generated dog sculptures.

austin-cheney 3y ago
This has never proven true in practice. There is so much people are not willing to communicate when third parties are present. This is why the behaviors and availability of features are wildly different on closed networks versus the web.
michaelt 3y ago
> any theoretical benefit that decentralization has (except ownership) can be emulated by a centralized architecture. One thing decentralised designs are much better at is: turning a blind eye to stigmatised and illegal activities. Such as pornography, piracy, reproductive rights, gun rights, criticism of the Chinese government, and so on.
- flir 3y ago
  I think that's a second order effect of ownership. You'll bring the same heat down on yourself (eventually) if you use a distributed protocol but rent your server from Amazon. Therefore I think it's ownership of the hardware that is the defence against censorship, not the protocol you use.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I feel the 99% part is important to repeat regularly among tech savvy groups: we are the fleetingly small exception. Most users don’t know and don’t care when it comes to the technical merits of implementation.

mattwilsonn888 3y ago

Decentralization is about enabling builders - users get the indirect benefits which follow. What you have done is justified 'everything under the sun' so long as it technically operates in a free market. But the ability for users to switch does not guarantee that the incentives to compete are at all healthy or robust. You are correct when you say centralization affects users indirectly and they will simply use services which are most immediately convenient. But competition is not giving users much benefit because every centralized service has a monopoly on their instantiation - it's not like you can make a few tweaks and give everyone a moderately better experience - you have to start from scratch and make yet another siloed and extractive platform for any and every improvement. And then if you do they can easily copy you back before you build a fraction of their momentum. X isn't going to let you improve the experience and just take users; they're going to say: "Have fun building up user trust and security infrastructure - also you're never getting our users." That's the difference between a protocol and a platform. The reason companies build platforms is because they need to fund infrastructure and opsec at scale so they effectively need to build monopoly protocols i.e. 'platforms.' So "switching is easy" is meaningless. Building successful competing platforms is, by design, very difficult; it takes large investments and huge risks and a lot of rebuilding what's already been done just for the sake of catching up to platforms who have obvious incentives and built-in methods to discourage competition via their tight, centralized structure. Even if the platform is better, it will probably fail relative to its predecessor. Decentralization most directly helps builders. If the basic requirements of a service are sufficiently decentralized security, networking, front-ends, then a builder who wants to compete via small (or any sized) improvements *does not need to rebuild the entire service.* Small builders who would otherwise not have access to startup capital, risk tolerance, or excessive build-hours would be equally able to compete because their decentralized access to the basic requirements cannot be locked behind an extractive economic scheme. Imagine every talented programmer making open source software could leverage it atop secure, robust and interoperable networks. And they could earn money from it. There is a massive difference between being a passive proponent of the free market and a maximalist for market competition. Your justification for the state of the field is a passive retreat to free-market capitalism. Users certainly have the ability to choose, but there are all sorts of schemes and situations in a free market where competition is choked. Honest proponents of decentralization are maximizers of opportunities for competition - they recognize that the free market is a gradient and not some binary quality which automatically imbues every operation inside it with good accountability.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

soulofmischief 3y ago

Few people seem to care about the environment either, or the exploited foreign worker class despite their impact on humanity, and besides it would be really hard to fight that battle, so we should just be apathetic and carry on with business as usual.

danbruc 3y ago
No, but those are battles that require political solutions, nothing you can realistically hope to address with recommendations.

mycall 3y ago

> chat, write mails, watch videos, have a website, buy stuff, sell stuff Why can't every computer do this without servers? It sounds like a ridiculous idea but it can't be impossible to achieve. My 24 core laptop has more power than my 4 core server.

danbruc 3y ago
If everyone runs their computer 24/7 or if you are willing to live with the limitation that somebody can only write you an email when your computer is turned on, then you can do that. And of course if everyone runs their computer 24/7 and exposes it to the internet, then we are back where we started, everyone runs, maintains, patches, and secures their own servers. Which nobody wants to do even if they were capable to do so, which they are not.
- elevation 3y ago
  Email already supports delivery to destinations which are intermittently connected. The legacy MTA behavior is to retry automatically every few hours for several days, with failure resulting in a notification to the sender. Operators have adjusted the behavior over the years to support grey-listing so the retry period and interval are both shorter -- but still in use! While communication between two hosts which are rarely simultaneously connected is best facilitated by a third party, some tweaks to your MTA's the delivery retry interval and period could enable reliable communications between email users who are connected simultaneously on a regular basis.