Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves

That was a great read, thanks to the author for making sense of entangled history between decentralization and file sharing.

I don't see why they seem to conclude that decentralization can only exist to circumvent the law, though : it's not because it happened like that in the past that it can only happen like that in the future.

The author is noticing that privacy is a big concern nowadays, but is somehow discarding quickly that remark. I see it as fundamental. Nowadays, privacy is not just a theme for activists or weirdos whom most people think "they're going too far". Nowadays, my aunt and my grand mother speak out privacy concerns about facebook (ironically, on facebook). There is also in the general public mind this vague idea that we're allowing a few companies to be stronger than governments (and thus, than democracies) and that they now own internet.

All of this is very fertile ground for decentralization, we'll see if that ground expands or shrinks, but this is clearly not about working around the law.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but aren't these only partially decentralized?

While GUN seems to be a p2p system, both those applications are single points of failure due to each being hosted on a single domain. Are there additional ways to access the same content?

This got me thinking about Mastodon, Peertube, etc. These are decentralised services for sharing content. Their user-base mainly favours them, iiuc, because the operators of centralised services were being too heavy-handed in their restrictions on content - not just legal but objectionable in various other ways (eg. adult content, instructions on making explosives, or fair-use of copyrighted material).

The article suggests that in each step we'd expect a decentralised solution to make the smallest possible change, and indeed we do: All these services work by decentralising the operator. Every mastodon instance is able to censor itself, or its own view of the other instances, but when this kind of failure occurs users can easily find another instance that is more accommodating.

Author here. I'm mainly writing about decentralization that is supposed to be mainstream while also looking for historical examples. With that in mind, I've looked at:

- Dozens of file sharing apps and their protocols (focus on Napster, Gnutella, FastTrack, and BitTorrent) - Tor, I2P - Tor hidden services - Original p2p Skype

If we generalize "decentralization" into "creative uses of distributed systems and/or cryptography for the sake of privacy and resilience" then we can include a bit more:

- PGP - Willfully blind centralized systems like mega.nz

Then finally if I dip into older attempts that IMO didn't get real adoption, we can include some other interesting examples:

- Freenet - Tribler - Mojonation

There are systems like Diaspora and Mastodon, but they're too close to the present IMO to use as historical examples. There are also obviously decentralized/distributed systems that serve as the backbone of the internet and I do want to allocate more time to learning these deeper, but they don't feel the same.

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Anyways, I'm not even really disagreeing with you but mainly trying to point out that I'm trying to draw from as much as possible. The original Skype stands out as a case where it seems to have no relationship with the law (https://twitter.com/backus/status/1014726515592818688).

If you have examples (failed or successful) that you recommend looking into, I'm all ears. As I've pointed out in a few other places, my point regarding the law isn't to say that this is all decentralization will ever be for. Instead, I'm saying this seems like the main point in the past for mainstream applications. Maybe decentralized apps will work as well as centralized apps in the future, but it seems like this might be far enough out that it would be incredibly risky for a startup to decentralize today when it doesn't need to.

I could say more, but this is already a lot. Thanks for reading my article!

Hi, thanks for reply.

I see your point ; I think there is actual and genuine interest in privacy and decentralization from what I see within my friends circle, but I may be biased because I'm active around ssb myself (and my friends may very well be interested in this because ... I'm interested in it). Time will tell :)

Regarding incentive for legal reasons, there's an other possible one that may happen (mentioning it for exhaustivity). Yesterday, I was reading an article about how an extreme-right candidate was favorite in brasilian elections. I was thinking : "oh look, an other fascist about to seize power". It feels like it's been a recurring theme this decade. And this is terrifying : could you imagine what the gestapo would have been with access to facebook data?

It doesn't even need the entire world to go mad before the incentive for privacy becomes very strong, 10 or 20 countries with strong engineers would be enough to kickstart it.