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These words ("centralization", "decentralization") have become a cargo-cult phenomenon. People are imbuing them with meaning they don't have, and trying to use

These words ("centralization", "decentralization") have become a cargo-cult phenomenon. People are imbuing them with meaning they don't have, and trying to use them to solve a problem I don't think they really understand. "In this document, "centralization" is the state of affairs where a single entity or a small group of them can observe, capture, control, or extract rent from the operation or use of an Internet function exclusively." There are other terms the authors could use: oligopoly, oligarchy, inverted totalitarianism, plutocracy, soft despotism, rent-seeking. But they didn't choose these terms, because the authors aren't political science majors, they are nerds. They're looking at the problem not as one of a larger set of economic, political and social factors, but one of a computer science problem to be solved with computer science means. If you've only ever been a carpenter, and your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But this isn't a computer science problem, and none of the solutions presented in this document will prevent the forces at work from merely "routing around" any technological barriers imposed. You cannot program around a government.

y8bj 3y ago
You’re trying to constrain meaning to your sensibilities. An authority you don’t have. Note humanity does not use Latin in day to day life. Language is not immutable physics.
dale_glass 3y ago
I disagree, it's in a large part a computer science problem. So for instance, I work on a decentralized VR world (https://overte.org/ https://overte.org/). Our architecture is very similar to that of the web -- we have a 3D analog of a web server, and a 3D analog of a web browser. Authentication is like on the web -- anonymous by default. Storage is wherever you want to fetch stuff from by HTTP. That's technically different from other systems in the same space. Eg, Second Life is a very centralized system. There's a grid, the various simulators are placed on a map, there's a central asset storage, and everyone must log in. If Second Life open sourced their backend, then the resulting outcome would be competing centralized platforms, where you either log into SL, or you log into the alternative. Each of those is a self-contained universe that you can be completely be removed from. And sure, there are various political implications there, but it's also a matter of what technical decisions and tradeoffs you make. SL for instance assumes everyone has an user account. Our system assumes everyone is anonymous by default. In SL there can be a coherent notion of a "world map" because a central entity decides which simulator goes where. In our system, such a thing is not possible because any given world has an arbitrary size and arbitrary owner, there's no way to say Alice and Bob are neighbors, nor there is a central system to ask for a definitive answer. The system is so well designed for this that IMO it likely was one of the things that made the business model of the original maker of it (High Fidelity) fail. The design is just naturally resistant to monetization. To the point that when I first encountered it, I was baffled at how it was ever going to make any money. The very design looks like something a highly ideological and anti-corporate group would come up with to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there still wouldn't be a way to make a profit.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I am sympathetic to your structural take, and also to the parent comment that technologists lack political chops. But I lost you here: > something a highly ideological and anti-corporate group would come up with to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there still wouldn't be a way to make a profit. No. The motive is to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there wouldn't be a way to destroy the efforts of those who choose not to make a profit.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    That part is not really serious. The point is that this was a commercial company, of a decent size and investment. And somehow it produced a design that one would expect to come out from some sort of highly anti-corporate group. Normally a company has a business plan of some kind. This design is almost as if somebody put a lot of thought into making sure there couldn't be one.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      I see your point that as an established commercial company they apparently failed to diligently research their returns. > somebody put a lot of thought into making sure there couldn't be one Perhaps nobody put thought into that. Maybe they're just bad business thinkers. But equating openness to an ideological anti-corporate bent seems a little strong. Is it possible they saw a profitable path that is also open?
      - dale_glass 3y ago
        Well, take Second Life, VR Chat, NeosVR, Resonite, etc. They all are pretty similar concept-wise. First thing you get is a login screen. You need an account. On some, that account costs (or used to) cost money. The world is locked inside a walled garden. If you don't like SL's rules, you don't get to touch anything SL related. You can't talk to your SL friends without logging into SL. The server code is closed source. You must use the central infrastructure. In some cases, like SL, the client is open. They sell add-ons like storage space for your stuff, and things like avatars you can directly buy. Some have an internal economy, but eg, Second Life quickly moved to being the official owners of the internal marketplace, and tax transactions. If you want to have a permanent chunk of the world in SL, you pay for that, monthly. All pretty standard. Now compare High Fidelity. You install the client, open it, and instantly you show up in-world with no login screen required. For data storage the solution is to pay any random web provider, or use the free AWS S3 tier. Any asset is just an URL pointing to https://example.com/file.gltf https://example.com/file.gltf -- served from any random server, downloaded client-side, and outside HiFi's control. Okay, so you pay for hosting your own environment? Nope. You host it on any Windows or Linux host you like, or the installer will even automatically install a server locally, easily start it from a menu, and NAT hole punch so you can host stuff on your laptop if you want to. Tax Alice selling stuff to Bob? Well, the system is so open that anyone can set up their own shop if they want to. The source code for the shop is open, so is both the server and client. Since assets are hosted externally, nothing prevents Alice paying Bob with Paypal, emailing a file, and escaping any taxation. Excluding people who break the rules? No such thing, there's no "grid". You can only be banned from individual worlds, like HN blocking you off doesn't mean anything for Ars Technica. And all of that was Apache 2.0 licensed, so anybody who wanted could absolutely set up their own commercial operation and not share any of their own improvements. If it was me running it, I'd have put the AGPL on it to discourage competitors, and either focus completely on custom setups for whoever needs one, or try to run a very light operation subsisting from Patreon.
Karellen 3y ago
> There are other terms the authors could use: oligopoly, oligarchy, inverted totalitarianism, plutocracy, soft despotism, rent-seeking. Those are motivations behind centralisation, but they won't all apply to all attempts at centralisation. There may be some situations where none of those particular motivations are the apparent reason behind a particular attempt at centralisation.[0] Using any one motivation, rather than the descriptive "centralisation", to describe the phenomena will necessarily miss instances of centralisation that the discussion should apply to. Using a long list of motivations every time would be unwieldy, and could still miss instances that should be referenced. [0] e.g. Signal https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
FridgeSeal 3y ago
Agreed. Developers - and by extension communities of them - tend to come up with technical solutions to problems, regardless of whether the problem is technical in nature, which invariably either don’t work at all, or make the situation actively worse when the technical solution is weaponised by those at fault in the first place. I’m not sure how we address this, which is a pity because even an uncertain response would be better than the “confident technical solution” we often get thrown around.
cryptonector 3y ago
Are there solutions to this problem?
ChainOfFools 3y ago
"how" people trying their hand at "why" problems.
elijah_moham 3y ago
[dead]

y8bj 3y ago

You’re trying to constrain meaning to your sensibilities. An authority you don’t have. Note humanity does not use Latin in day to day life. Language is not immutable physics.

dale_glass 3y ago

I disagree, it's in a large part a computer science problem. So for instance, I work on a decentralized VR world (https://overte.org/ https://overte.org/). Our architecture is very similar to that of the web -- we have a 3D analog of a web server, and a 3D analog of a web browser. Authentication is like on the web -- anonymous by default. Storage is wherever you want to fetch stuff from by HTTP. That's technically different from other systems in the same space. Eg, Second Life is a very centralized system. There's a grid, the various simulators are placed on a map, there's a central asset storage, and everyone must log in. If Second Life open sourced their backend, then the resulting outcome would be competing centralized platforms, where you either log into SL, or you log into the alternative. Each of those is a self-contained universe that you can be completely be removed from. And sure, there are various political implications there, but it's also a matter of what technical decisions and tradeoffs you make. SL for instance assumes everyone has an user account. Our system assumes everyone is anonymous by default. In SL there can be a coherent notion of a "world map" because a central entity decides which simulator goes where. In our system, such a thing is not possible because any given world has an arbitrary size and arbitrary owner, there's no way to say Alice and Bob are neighbors, nor there is a central system to ask for a definitive answer. The system is so well designed for this that IMO it likely was one of the things that made the business model of the original maker of it (High Fidelity) fail. The design is just naturally resistant to monetization. To the point that when I first encountered it, I was baffled at how it was ever going to make any money. The very design looks like something a highly ideological and anti-corporate group would come up with to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there still wouldn't be a way to make a profit.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
I am sympathetic to your structural take, and also to the parent comment that technologists lack political chops. But I lost you here: > something a highly ideological and anti-corporate group would come up with to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there still wouldn't be a way to make a profit. No. The motive is to make sure that even if some of them fell to the "dark side", there wouldn't be a way to destroy the efforts of those who choose not to make a profit.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  That part is not really serious. The point is that this was a commercial company, of a decent size and investment. And somehow it produced a design that one would expect to come out from some sort of highly anti-corporate group. Normally a company has a business plan of some kind. This design is almost as if somebody put a lot of thought into making sure there couldn't be one.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    I see your point that as an established commercial company they apparently failed to diligently research their returns. > somebody put a lot of thought into making sure there couldn't be one Perhaps nobody put thought into that. Maybe they're just bad business thinkers. But equating openness to an ideological anti-corporate bent seems a little strong. Is it possible they saw a profitable path that is also open?
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      Well, take Second Life, VR Chat, NeosVR, Resonite, etc. They all are pretty similar concept-wise. First thing you get is a login screen. You need an account. On some, that account costs (or used to) cost money. The world is locked inside a walled garden. If you don't like SL's rules, you don't get to touch anything SL related. You can't talk to your SL friends without logging into SL. The server code is closed source. You must use the central infrastructure. In some cases, like SL, the client is open. They sell add-ons like storage space for your stuff, and things like avatars you can directly buy. Some have an internal economy, but eg, Second Life quickly moved to being the official owners of the internal marketplace, and tax transactions. If you want to have a permanent chunk of the world in SL, you pay for that, monthly. All pretty standard. Now compare High Fidelity. You install the client, open it, and instantly you show up in-world with no login screen required. For data storage the solution is to pay any random web provider, or use the free AWS S3 tier. Any asset is just an URL pointing to https://example.com/file.gltf https://example.com/file.gltf -- served from any random server, downloaded client-side, and outside HiFi's control. Okay, so you pay for hosting your own environment? Nope. You host it on any Windows or Linux host you like, or the installer will even automatically install a server locally, easily start it from a menu, and NAT hole punch so you can host stuff on your laptop if you want to. Tax Alice selling stuff to Bob? Well, the system is so open that anyone can set up their own shop if they want to. The source code for the shop is open, so is both the server and client. Since assets are hosted externally, nothing prevents Alice paying Bob with Paypal, emailing a file, and escaping any taxation. Excluding people who break the rules? No such thing, there's no "grid". You can only be banned from individual worlds, like HN blocking you off doesn't mean anything for Ars Technica. And all of that was Apache 2.0 licensed, so anybody who wanted could absolutely set up their own commercial operation and not share any of their own improvements. If it was me running it, I'd have put the AGPL on it to discourage competitors, and either focus completely on custom setups for whoever needs one, or try to run a very light operation subsisting from Patreon.

Karellen 3y ago

> There are other terms the authors could use: oligopoly, oligarchy, inverted totalitarianism, plutocracy, soft despotism, rent-seeking. Those are motivations behind centralisation, but they won't all apply to all attempts at centralisation. There may be some situations where none of those particular motivations are the apparent reason behind a particular attempt at centralisation.[0] Using any one motivation, rather than the descriptive "centralisation", to describe the phenomena will necessarily miss instances of centralisation that the discussion should apply to. Using a long list of motivations every time would be unwieldy, and could still miss instances that should be referenced. [0] e.g. Signal https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

FridgeSeal 3y ago

Agreed. Developers - and by extension communities of them - tend to come up with technical solutions to problems, regardless of whether the problem is technical in nature, which invariably either don’t work at all, or make the situation actively worse when the technical solution is weaponised by those at fault in the first place. I’m not sure how we address this, which is a pity because even an uncertain response would be better than the “confident technical solution” we often get thrown around.

cryptonector 3y ago

Are there solutions to this problem?

ChainOfFools 3y ago

"how" people trying their hand at "why" problems.

elijah_moham 3y ago

[dead]