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> Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. Until the platform enshittifies like Reddit and Twitter did.

immibis 1y ago
Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform that hasn't enshittified yet. As we are seeing now with Bluesky. Perhaps the idea of decentralization was incorrect to begin with, an NI hallucination - perhaps it should be all about centralization-hopping instead. I believe this is what Nostr aims for, though I've never used it.
- nout 1y ago
  Nostr is a bit different - you own a private key that signs any message (and action, but it's all JSON blobs) locally in your app and then you just broadcast these signed messages to servers ("relays") that cache and relay these to other relays or users. Other users can use your public key to cryptographically verify that the message is from you. The benefit is that you fully own your data, you can later decide to rebroadcast it to any other set of relays. It's common to have e.g. 20 relays connected from your app. There is a group of people that care and use it and it works well. One argument could be made here that decentralization also means that there will be variety of different protocols and solutions and that's ok.
- fsflover 1y ago
  > Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform It's a wrong interpretation. Since they leave, they obviously care. They just don't know that decentralized platforms offer long-term solution.
  - immibis 1y ago
    It's a common mistake of programmers to treat business as something long-term. Saying "don't do XYZ because it'll stop working in a year once they catch on and block you. Business leaders are stupid for doing XYZ." Yeah, so that means you still made a profit for a year, and business leaders are not stupid for doing it. A year later, there could be a different thing that will work for another year. Changing what you do every year or even more often is just normal business. You don't have to find one thing that works indefinitely. Maybe social media is like business.
  - grumbel 1y ago
    > They just don't know that decentralized platforms offer long-term solution. The crux is that most "decentralized" platforms don't offer long-term solution either. The whole concept of Federation only works as long as everybody is nice to each other, once that stops happening or bus-factor kicks in, you are back to all the problems of centralization and lock-in, since everybody is a user on a server they don't control. It's really no different from early Twitter or Reddit days when everything was nice and open until it suddenly wasn't. Platforms that are actually build for true decentralization, where the user owns everything and the server owns nothing (public key crypto + dumb relay servers), are still extremely rare. Nostr is one that seems to be on the right track, but that's about the only one I can think of.
    - fsflover 1y ago
      > The whole concept of Federation only works as long as everybody is nice to each other I don't see how it can be true. Is everybody nice to each other on the Internet? On Mastodon, disagreements lead to independent islands not federating with each other, which is fine, too.
      - grumbel 1y ago
        > Is everybody nice to each other on the Internet? For most part, yes. ISPs still carry traffic as is and don't just block random hosts because they don't like them. This is however slowly changing in Europe due to ever increasing censorship and age verification. The Great Firewall of China hasn't been nice either. And Claudflare has also become rather annoying with its constant never ending CAPTCHAs. > On Mastodon, disagreements lead to independent islands not federating with each other, which is fine, too. How is that different from Twitter, Facebook or any other centralized service? All of them are just independent island that don't federate with each other. If that's ok, what problem is federation solving exactly? To me the goal of decentralization is "Get rid of the middle man between me and my audience". Federation ain't doing that, it puts far too much control in the hands of the server.
        fsflover 1y ago

immibis 1y ago

Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform that hasn't enshittified yet. As we are seeing now with Bluesky. Perhaps the idea of decentralization was incorrect to begin with, an NI hallucination - perhaps it should be all about centralization-hopping instead. I believe this is what Nostr aims for, though I've never used it.

nout 1y ago
Nostr is a bit different - you own a private key that signs any message (and action, but it's all JSON blobs) locally in your app and then you just broadcast these signed messages to servers ("relays") that cache and relay these to other relays or users. Other users can use your public key to cryptographically verify that the message is from you. The benefit is that you fully own your data, you can later decide to rebroadcast it to any other set of relays. It's common to have e.g. 20 relays connected from your app. There is a group of people that care and use it and it works well. One argument could be made here that decentralization also means that there will be variety of different protocols and solutions and that's ok.
fsflover 1y ago
> Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform It's a wrong interpretation. Since they leave, they obviously care. They just don't know that decentralized platforms offer long-term solution.
- immibis 1y ago
  It's a common mistake of programmers to treat business as something long-term. Saying "don't do XYZ because it'll stop working in a year once they catch on and block you. Business leaders are stupid for doing XYZ." Yeah, so that means you still made a profit for a year, and business leaders are not stupid for doing it. A year later, there could be a different thing that will work for another year. Changing what you do every year or even more often is just normal business. You don't have to find one thing that works indefinitely. Maybe social media is like business.
- grumbel 1y ago
  > They just don't know that decentralized platforms offer long-term solution. The crux is that most "decentralized" platforms don't offer long-term solution either. The whole concept of Federation only works as long as everybody is nice to each other, once that stops happening or bus-factor kicks in, you are back to all the problems of centralization and lock-in, since everybody is a user on a server they don't control. It's really no different from early Twitter or Reddit days when everything was nice and open until it suddenly wasn't. Platforms that are actually build for true decentralization, where the user owns everything and the server owns nothing (public key crypto + dumb relay servers), are still extremely rare. Nostr is one that seems to be on the right track, but that's about the only one I can think of.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    > The whole concept of Federation only works as long as everybody is nice to each other I don't see how it can be true. Is everybody nice to each other on the Internet? On Mastodon, disagreements lead to independent islands not federating with each other, which is fine, too.
    - grumbel 1y ago
      > Is everybody nice to each other on the Internet? For most part, yes. ISPs still carry traffic as is and don't just block random hosts because they don't like them. This is however slowly changing in Europe due to ever increasing censorship and age verification. The Great Firewall of China hasn't been nice either. And Claudflare has also become rather annoying with its constant never ending CAPTCHAs. > On Mastodon, disagreements lead to independent islands not federating with each other, which is fine, too. How is that different from Twitter, Facebook or any other centralized service? All of them are just independent island that don't federate with each other. If that's ok, what problem is federation solving exactly? To me the goal of decentralization is "Get rid of the middle man between me and my audience". Federation ain't doing that, it puts far too much control in the hands of the server.
      - fsflover 1y ago