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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?

#81
post #8
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About federation in particular: Moxie wrote about why Signal is unfederated a little while back: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ It has some interesting insights into when federation works and when it doesn’t. “Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is poss…

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…

The worst cases are the only ones that actually matter.

If you can demonstrate your stuff still works in the worst case, then when the worst case does actually happen, your staff is the only thing that will still be working when everything else goes down the tubes.

All of computer science is predicated on worst case analysis for a very, very good reason.

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

#82

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…

you extract value from fat protocols by owning part of the protocol itself, then influencing the direction of the development by being part of the community.
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