4 ms·
Email essentially IS centralized at DNS. Any decentralized social network has to solve the lookup problem: how do I find people. None really do this in a way
by wdewind 14y ago
Email essentially IS centralized at DNS. Any decentralized social network has to solve the lookup problem: how do I find people. None really do this in a way that's going to make it fundamentally different than what we have now.
I can't help feeling that the natural outcome of decentralized social networking is that people eventually start hosting them for mom and dad, then a few friends, then start companies, then we are back to facebook. Someone, somewhere is going to have to have a database of names mapped to servers.
Centralization is, in an abstract way, present in so many of our social structures, that yes, I disagree that within a capitalist economic structure (one which is optimized for sharing of services rather than individualism, ie: non-technical users simply wont do this unless the work is done for them, like facebook did) it would be next to impossible for something like this to work.
People quite simply don't want to deal with this shit, and centralization brings efficiency and management amongst many other things.
- jackalope 14y agoEmail is a decentralized service and the task of discovery is solved with DNS. If you have an address, jackalope@example.com, you can find out where to send the message if it is explicitly set (MX record) or not (A record). I don't see why you can't do the same with a decentralized social network.
- wdewind 14y agoAnd who runs the DNS servers?
- marshray 14y agoThe most popular ones are run by IANA, ICANN, and Verisign. But nothing stops most of us in the free world from choosing an alternative root system. Other than the support cost of a minor config change in our OS or application software.
- Sami_Lehtinen 14y agoOr mymail@[127.0.0.1]
- wmf 14y agoEmail essentially IS centralized at DNS. The difference between DNS and Facebook/Twitter is that DNS is regulated so that bad guys have to go through some kind of due process to shut down your domain. It's not perfect, but it's better than what else we've got.
- unixnoob 14y agoAKAIK it is still possible with most popular email servers to send and recive using only IP addresses (e.g. by placing the address in brackets). DNS is really only optional for email, at least functionally. But I think a lot of people assume there can be no email without domain names.
- wdewind 14y agoSo why not regulate facebook and twitter instead of make another service that will essentially turn into DNS, which we already have?
- wmf 14y agoFacebook and Twitter were funded under the assumption that they would be unregulated monopolies, so regulating them amounts to stealing from their investors. Instead of another service that will essentially turn into DNS, I would propose just using DNS for naming. So if you're Tyler Durden you register tyler.durden.name and put an A record pointing to your DiSo server. Now you can switch providers while retaining your identity by just changing the A record.
- grovecai 14y agoExactly, no matter how decentralized is the infrastructure, there always has a centralized node, such as BitTorrent tracker.
- nine_k 14y agoBitTorrent is capable of being decentralized from day one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker#Trackerless_torrents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker#Trackerless_...