Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 82 posts

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#41

Post by heckanoobs »

kuschku wrote: post #29
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he's wrong and it's easy, why can no one do it? Why did Slack overrun IRC? XMPP left by the wayside by Google and Facebook? Because it isn't easy, and users will always value the experience over compatibility and principal.

Marketing, marketing, and amount of money that goes into that development. Give me a few thousand developers, a multi billion dollar ad budget, and the ability to signup every facebook user on the planet to my messaging service, and I'll also win against XMPP. In fact, with those resources carrier pidgeons would've won against XMPP.

This doesn't explain why IRC can't compete with Slack or the other corporate messaging services.

Slack was a side project by a failing game company. Its growth was largely organic.

I think the original premise is right that user experience is more important than ethics or philosophy or whatever the heck it is we're talking about when federations come up

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#42

Post by dmichulke »

hxchen wrote: post #5

I agree with you on that hybrid would be a more sustainable solution. I want to highlight a technical perspective. That’s the scalability issue of Blockchain. Fully decentralization cannot afford scalability, just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal. In fact, many technical solutions to scale the Blockchain are using the same principle of your idea of federation.

> just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal

OT: I think it's about time to end this myth. We have the internetz for a few decades and voting machines (supposedly to make it all simpler) yet somehow direct democracy is impossible and we "need" the democracy as done in the 19th century just because ... well, because no single government is willing to give power back.

Is it possible to have a referendum on every political proposal? Yes.

Is it done? No.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#43

Post by dmichulke »

dmichulke wrote: post #42
hxchen wrote: post #5

I agree with you on that hybrid would be a more sustainable solution. I want to highlight a technical perspective. That’s the scalability issue of Blockchain. Fully decentralization cannot afford scalability, just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal. In fact, many technical solutions to scale the Blockchain are using the same principle of your idea of federation.

> just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal OT: I think it's about time to end this myth. We have the internetz for a few decades and voting machines (supposedly to make it all simpler) yet somehow direct democracy is impossible and we "need" the democracy as done in the 19th century just because ... well, because no single government is willing to give power back. Is it possible to have a referen…

Just to be clear:

We don't need a referendum on every issue, we just need a way to

- change your representative every week or so

- override your representative's vote within a given time window

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#44

Post by BurritoAlPastor »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
kuschku wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but moxie is mostly wrong. He's only seen worst-case scenarios and assumes everything is lile that, so he builds his centralized stuff instead. You can easily move forward with a federated protocol as well if you've got cooperating people, guarantee only 6 months of support for a protocol version, and have a versioning and feature flag system. Hell in one project I contribute to we've kept protocol compatibilit…

If he's wrong and it's easy, why can no one do it? Why did Slack overrun IRC? XMPP left by the wayside by Google and Facebook? Because it isn't easy, and users will always value the experience over compatibility and principal.

The counterexample here would be Mastodon, which I believe now has more users than IRC and seems to be growing quite healthily. (And, AFAIK, isn't funded by any megacorps; it's actual grassroots FOSS.)

When it comes to social media software, people care about two tightly-coupled things: if the people they need to talk to can be reached with it, and if the UX is good. (People abandoned IRC because its UX, which was never good, degraded to unusability in a multi-device not-always-online embedded-media world.)

But there's nothing about federation that inherently requires bad UX. But federation generally means open-source (because there's no market pressure for interoperability), and open-source means bad UX. Mastodon owes 80% of its success to having been principally developed by somebody who knows how to make a goddamned webpage. The other 20% is that it's pretty easy to host.

I think the really interesting takeaway is that the giants only don't support interoperability because they have a monopoly on good UX. If something highly usable and open-source appeared in the chat space and started gaining serious traction, the enterprise players would have to entertain the notion of playing ball and supporting the protocol – and if one of them did it, the rest would follow.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#45

Post by paulsutter »

Blockchains were designed to prevent double-spending, and not to solve other problems. Most blockchain enthusiasm is misplaced.

One subjective (but powerful) reason for blockchain implementations, is that we're all human, and our egos want to avoid making someone else's database The Big Platform. Or maybe that's our rational sense (looking at GOOG/FB), we don't want our application controlled by someone else.

This article spells out a few reasons why new categories of securities make sense to implement on a blockchain:

https://hackernoon.com/the-security-token-thesis-4c590476106...

> “Do we need a blockchain for this? Couldn’t this be done with a database?” The answer is yes, some of it could be done with a centralized database, but it begs the question “why hasn’t it already been done?” The answer is that the current centralized solutions for electronic value transfer lack compatibility — they don’t talk to each other. I can’t send value from PayPal to Venmo, or from E*Trade to RealtyShares. These layers aren’t interoperable.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#46

Post by SeoxyS »

mabbo wrote: post #6
cjslep wrote: post #3

Decentralized infrastructure with federated transactions describes many successful technologies such as email. I think federation is just a design tool meant to solve a specific problem, much like decentralization, programming language choice, data structures, etc are more concrete software engineering ones.

Certificate authorities seems to follow the same pattern. I wonder if we might see a crytocurrency someday follow that same pattern: the chain is decentralized and public, but the miners are each replaced by authorities that a user can choose to accept (or not). The downside to this would be disagreements over who actually owns what. You'd only be able to make a transaction if both the buyer and seller agree on who o…

Stellar is this

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#47

Post by hannasanarion »

y_molodtsov wrote: post #28
cjslep wrote: post #3

Decentralized infrastructure with federated transactions describes many successful technologies such as email. I think federation is just a design tool meant to solve a specific problem, much like decentralization, programming language choice, data structures, etc are more concrete software engineering ones.

Email is a relic of an old era and isn’t a very good example. It wouldn’t catch on if it emerged just now. More and more modern email clients starts to add things on top of the protocol turning their apps into walled gardens (Polymail, Spark, Gmail too actually). Not because they’re evil, because it’s impossible for some players to update the protocol itself.

That strikes me as a selling feature, not a problem. Everyone can talk to each other over email, but the choice of provider is still meaningful and you can pick one that suits your needs.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#48

Post by TomK32 »

paulsutter wrote: post #45

Blockchains were designed to prevent double-spending, and not to solve other problems. Most blockchain enthusiasm is misplaced. One subjective (but powerful) reason for blockchain implementations, is that we're all human, and our egos want to avoid making someone else's database The Big Platform. Or maybe that's our rational sense (looking at GOOG/FB), we don't want our application controlled by someone else. This ar…

We have seen a 51% double spending attack on Bitcoin Gold just a few days ago. Can we stop claiming that blockchains prevent that?

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#49

Post by purvis »

endymi0n wrote: post #38

Here's the core of the problem and also why most of crypto / blockchain technology will go down the drain soon: Decentralization isn't a business model. The opposite is. That's it. How you get to any competitive edge in a market is: 1) Be better than your competitors in a field. 2) Own that field and displace everyone else. 3) Extract value. The Crypto hype happened because a super elegant technical solution (-> Bloc…

Your argument against crypto is one of the more compelling I've read. I like the "deep local optimum" visual you painted. I definitely agree if you're comparing "crypto" directly to centralized companies doing traditional things -- they're not going anywhere.

However, I think it solves a different problem. It's a geopolitical problem. Blockchain technology provide a bulletproof (so far) way of exchanging value across borders without having to trust any middlemen.

There's a quote, I believe by Erik Voorhees, saying roughly: "Bitcoin is separation of money and state".

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#50

Post by gozrik »

openfuture wrote: post #14

I've thought a lot about this recently so I'll share my 2c First some semantics; I use decentralization as a term that applies to both distributed and federated systems. That way the aggregate term 'decentralization' contrasts centralisation properly. Centralized systems usually work quite well until they reach a certain scale. At what scale centralized systems start breaking down is an interesting question that depe…

Not much to add, but wanted to say you've given me a lot to think about — thanks.
Post reply on HN