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

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

#71

Post by kuschku »

sanderjd wrote: post #64
kuschku wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC didn't by even have anyone trying to improve stuff until the IRCv3 WG came along, and now we're seeing massive innovation and adoption in short timeframes.

But the fact that nobody was working on it is also part of the same discussion: non-centralized services haven't had clear ways to incentive the time investment to develop them. The community and respect of working on open source has worked well enough for some developers to create and keep these projects sputtering along, but it never worked for the designers and product vision folks. One of the promises of blockcha…

Yes, this is a massive reason where donations of some form can be useful.

And it's the real issue — not enough people contributing.

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

#72

Post by sanderjd »

kuschku wrote: post #71
sanderjd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the fact that nobody was working on it is also part of the same discussion: non-centralized services haven't had clear ways to incentive the time investment to develop them. The community and respect of working on open source has worked well enough for some developers to create and keep these projects sputtering along, but it never worked for the designers and product vision folks. One of the promises of blockcha…

Yes, this is a massive reason where donations of some form can be useful. And it's the real issue — not enough people contributing.

But the point is: that hasn't worked. We've had plenty of time now to see that that model does not work very well. I'm at least somewhat of a blockchain skeptic, but what I do like about it is that it isn't just trying to solve this problem in a way that we know doesn't work very well; it's trying to find a new answer that might work better.

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

#73

Post by NetOpWibby »

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…

Damn, username checks out. I enjoyed reading your thoughts, thanks.

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

#74

Post by lightedman »

Taek wrote: post #16

Most decentralized projects are approaching the problem in the wrong way. Blockchains are a new, early technology, and most of the developers building blockchains don't understand them very well and aren't using them correctly. I think the dotcom bubble was much the same way - suddenly everyone had a website, but almost nobody had a useful website, because people didn't really understand how a website was best able t…

" Blockchains are a new, early technology"

Permissionless distributed databases have existed since the late 70s. This is not a new technology by any means.

"Blockchain core infrastructure needs more time."

I'd say 50 years is more than enough time to see that it doesn't work because it can't scale as-designed.

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

#75

Post by TomMarius »

drablyechoes wrote: post #70
rqs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I think some people got it wrong: Decentralization is not a feature, it's a method. (Most) Users won't care whether or not they are using something decentralized, they only care what they can achievement with that software/service. Is it doing better than others on the market? Back to the topic, about why Slack defeated IRC & XMPP: A product -- whether or not it's a online service or a hardware -- needs to…

> Users won't care whether or not they are using something decentralized This is a good point, and it is demonstrably the case even among cryptocurrency users who have a coinbase wallet. Coinbase is not decentralized, and for a lot of users this is actually a nice feature because you can transfer BTC balance from one coinbase user to another without incurring any miner fee or waiting a long time for confirmations. If…

> If most people who wanted to use bitcoin actually cared about decentralization, coinbase (and other similar services) would have virtually no users.

Or maybe Bitcoin isn't good enough just yet (e.g. Lightning)?

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

#77

Post by woah »

gregknicholson wrote: post #60
woah wrote: post #19

The problem with a lot of federated platforms (I’m thinking of diaspora, secure scuttlebutt, mastodon etc) is that whole they do provide a way for data to be easily synchronized and replicated, they never answer the question of who is ultimately going to store the data and why. So you end up with a “temporary” list of servers for new users to sign up with, which become centralized in their own right.

SSB is distinct from Diaspora and Mastodon in this respect. It's decentralised rather than federated (pub servers are just peers with a public address). SSB's answer to this question is: your friends are going to store your data, because they want to read it themselves. You are going to store your friends' data, because you want to pass it on to your other friends.

Actually, I'm mostly basing this on SSB, since it is the only one of these three I've used seriously, and I've followed its development since when it was just Dominic Tarr and Paul Frazee in an IRC chat.

The system has gotten a lot more complex since the early days, and although I no longer know all the internals, it seems that the pub servers are pretty integral to its operation, and you can't get someone onto the system without one. I agree that an SSB-like system with pub servers removed and replaced by STUN/TURN servers which would only facilitate WebRTC would not have this problem.

Just to be clear, the reason for this is that STUN/TURN servers are so lightweight and have very little to do with the actual operation of the system, so they could be put on a list on the main website and supported by very small donations.

Then again, like you said, one could describe such a system as "decentralized", not "federated". I also suspect it would have performance characteristics that many users would not like.

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

#78

Post by purvis »

smilesnd wrote: post #59
purvis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But currently this only works in third world countries where the government lacks resources or care to combat it. Plus their is still a middleman if you don't mine the cryptocurrency yourself. I still have to pay a exchange if I cannot find someone willing to take cash/check from me. You also have the opposite effect where you need the exchange and a bank account to turn that coin I sent into usable cash.

Correct, but you only have to trust a centralized company within your own country. You don't have to trust a bank or money transmitter in a foreign country. In the case of people in countries where they don't have an adequate level of government protection over financial transactions, I think it becomes more interesting. In cases like those, it's possible they don't even value their own local currency as a store of value and might feel a cryptocurrency has better odds of being worth more than zero by the time they need to spend it.

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

#79

Post by nostrademons »

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…

I think you're mostly right (or at least insightful), but there's a caveat. Decentralization can't create big companies, by definition, but it can destroy big companies.

There's ample historical examples of that. The Internet (originally) built upon the plain old telephone network, but eventually ended up supplanting telephones, AOL, the big-3 TV networks, and many other communication monopolies. Open-source software has commoditized many formerly-profitable software businesses. Napster and the P2P craze failed as businesses, but not before taking down the record industry and opening the door for iTunes & Spotify.

For many of crypto's proponents, that's a win. They'd be happy if a bunch of banks & VC firms faded into obscurity. There'll be new evil corporations built on the backs of crypto (just witness the community blowback against Coinbase), and in the long term some form of centralized power will just colonize the crypto space the way Google & Facebook colonized the Internet, but in the meantime it may shake up quite a few old industries.

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

#80

Post by whiskers08xmt »

smilesnd wrote: post #59
purvis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But currently this only works in third world countries where the government lacks resources or care to combat it. Plus their is still a middleman if you don't mine the cryptocurrency yourself. I still have to pay a exchange if I cannot find someone willing to take cash/check from me. You also have the opposite effect where you need the exchange and a bank account to turn that coin I sent into usable cash.

Most of the world's population lives in third and second world countries. You're absolutely right that the centralized fiat gateways are the obvious, censurable bottlenecks of crypto-currency, and there's no good way around that, but crypto-currency itself is still an attractive way for many people, to move their money out of very restrictive regimes. The centralized exchange problem is mainly a problem of creating a black/grey market economy, with crypto-currency as it's main unit of value transfer, which of course is a whole other can of worms.
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