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> Personal instances will be pretty rare Personal instances of the US Post Office are also pretty rare, my dude. You gonna go deliver your mail yourself? If so

> Personal instances will be pretty rare Personal instances of the US Post Office are also pretty rare, my dude. You gonna go deliver your mail yourself? If so, why write a letter? You want total distributed decentralization? Use Gnutella. It's equivalent to giving your letter to your neighbor and asking them to deliver it, and they ask their neighbor, etc, until it reaches a back alley in Algeria, and then that Algerian calls you on the phone, and if you're home, you read the letter out loud live on the phone. Turns out that's a pretty crap way to deliver letters. But it's decentralized!! People: Stop being so fucking obsessed with decentralization. It's not that great. I'm sure you're all having lots of fun inventing crap technology to solve an already solved problem, but you're just codesturbating.

lorean_victor 3y ago
I wouldn't. I also wouldn't think about a decentralised email solution, or a decentralised messaging service. doesn't make sense. as for publishing my own blog though? nah I'd really rather a decentralised system where I can host my own blog wherever. and yes I do realise most people don't care about that, and yes I'm not sure if they'd care about other benefits of decentralisation as well or not, but its not like there is nothing there that would affect them.
sedatk 3y ago
People tend to forget that we had everything decentralized in the first place, then centralized them for the sake of convenience: Email -> GMail, IRC -> Slack, RSS -> Social Media, Blog -> Medium, Forums -> Reddit and so forth. And basically, convenience won big time. These are not mutually exclusive though. We need decentralized services to fight discrimination and censorship. But, I agree that there is also disproportionate obsession with decentralization at the moment.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  I wouldn't characterise the history of the internet as having started with "everything decentralised". if I'm not missing something, it was completely the other way around. introduction of general populous to the internet was through internet gatekeepers like aol or msn, with unimaginable convenience (and centralisation). that convenience lost, in the end, to the world wide web, where a ton of single individuals could set up a website and reach other people across the internet. some of the big central giants of today got born out of this transition (and some were instrumental to it, namely google). something similar happened to smartphones. ios was intended to be a closed off gatekeeper. people jailbroke it, and apple caved in and opened the system up, allowing anyone to provide services (apps) on it. similar to the www transition, we had a period were you could easily find popular apps made by a single programmer. this decentralisation also basically enabled most centralised social and messaging services of today. so I see it more as a cycle: in stable times, convenience causes a drift towards further centralisation. when there is a platform shift, established players lose their defensive power, some essential operational costs drop drastically, resulting in a sudden decentralisation: tons of small (mostly individual) players can now enter the market and gain prominence through it. the market then stabilises, thriving players shrink in number and grow in size, and become the convenient, centralised corps of the future, only to be similarly shaken by market forces that allowed them to exist in the first place. are we close to such a shift now? I think so. current version of the internet is clearly starting to rot and drown in noise, while we are the cusp of new heights of information processing and accessibility through LLMs, while also thriving to push the boundaries of the information we circulate (AR/VR). but who knows.
  - sedatk 3y ago
    I mean, yes, you're missing something, the first and foremost, Internet. :) Its sole purpose was to solve the information access problem in a decentralized way. That was the rationale behind the ARPANET project. Then, DNS came, which is also a decentralized solution to the name resolution problem. BGP routing is also similarly decentralized. World Wide Web itself is decentralized. IRC is decentralized. These technologies predate almost everything you mentioned. I agree with your sentiment that it's mostly a cycle. I just wanted to emphasize that decentralization had never been a novel idea. We've always had decentralization, it's not like a new revolutionary thing as it's presented. That's my point.
    - lorean_victor 3y ago
      tbf I mentioned the www era decentralisation mostly. but I agree. as mentioned earlier, actually the fact that decentralisation has happened multiple times before, while convenience was kind of against it, is the reason I think it will most definitely happen again as well. I'm even assuming it won't be far off by considering similarities in some respects to the situation before two other large-scale decentralisations we've observed (www and apps), though of course that is the same as predicting when the next platform shift will occur and that's not someone can claim with meaningful precision, IMO.

lorean_victor 3y ago

I wouldn't. I also wouldn't think about a decentralised email solution, or a decentralised messaging service. doesn't make sense. as for publishing my own blog though? nah I'd really rather a decentralised system where I can host my own blog wherever. and yes I do realise most people don't care about that, and yes I'm not sure if they'd care about other benefits of decentralisation as well or not, but its not like there is nothing there that would affect them.

sedatk 3y ago

People tend to forget that we had everything decentralized in the first place, then centralized them for the sake of convenience: Email -> GMail, IRC -> Slack, RSS -> Social Media, Blog -> Medium, Forums -> Reddit and so forth. And basically, convenience won big time. These are not mutually exclusive though. We need decentralized services to fight discrimination and censorship. But, I agree that there is also disproportionate obsession with decentralization at the moment.

lorean_victor 3y ago
I wouldn't characterise the history of the internet as having started with "everything decentralised". if I'm not missing something, it was completely the other way around. introduction of general populous to the internet was through internet gatekeepers like aol or msn, with unimaginable convenience (and centralisation). that convenience lost, in the end, to the world wide web, where a ton of single individuals could set up a website and reach other people across the internet. some of the big central giants of today got born out of this transition (and some were instrumental to it, namely google). something similar happened to smartphones. ios was intended to be a closed off gatekeeper. people jailbroke it, and apple caved in and opened the system up, allowing anyone to provide services (apps) on it. similar to the www transition, we had a period were you could easily find popular apps made by a single programmer. this decentralisation also basically enabled most centralised social and messaging services of today. so I see it more as a cycle: in stable times, convenience causes a drift towards further centralisation. when there is a platform shift, established players lose their defensive power, some essential operational costs drop drastically, resulting in a sudden decentralisation: tons of small (mostly individual) players can now enter the market and gain prominence through it. the market then stabilises, thriving players shrink in number and grow in size, and become the convenient, centralised corps of the future, only to be similarly shaken by market forces that allowed them to exist in the first place. are we close to such a shift now? I think so. current version of the internet is clearly starting to rot and drown in noise, while we are the cusp of new heights of information processing and accessibility through LLMs, while also thriving to push the boundaries of the information we circulate (AR/VR). but who knows.
- sedatk 3y ago
  I mean, yes, you're missing something, the first and foremost, Internet. :) Its sole purpose was to solve the information access problem in a decentralized way. That was the rationale behind the ARPANET project. Then, DNS came, which is also a decentralized solution to the name resolution problem. BGP routing is also similarly decentralized. World Wide Web itself is decentralized. IRC is decentralized. These technologies predate almost everything you mentioned. I agree with your sentiment that it's mostly a cycle. I just wanted to emphasize that decentralization had never been a novel idea. We've always had decentralization, it's not like a new revolutionary thing as it's presented. That's my point.
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    tbf I mentioned the www era decentralisation mostly. but I agree. as mentioned earlier, actually the fact that decentralisation has happened multiple times before, while convenience was kind of against it, is the reason I think it will most definitely happen again as well. I'm even assuming it won't be far off by considering similarities in some respects to the situation before two other large-scale decentralisations we've observed (www and apps), though of course that is the same as predicting when the next platform shift will occur and that's not someone can claim with meaningful precision, IMO.