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How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

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Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#151

Post by AnthonyMouse »

true_religion wrote: post #94
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has a shallow moat? People only use it at all because of the network effect. And Apple's main draw is the large number of affluent customers. They'll have developers as long as they have those users, whether the developers like it or not. Which is why they can get away with charging 30% to developers when platforms have historically given incentives to developers to develop for their platform.

That is a bit circular to say developers like Apple because they like money, thus Apple is not truly liked for itself. Apple was successful in building a platform because it's in house developers were capable of putting together something that was popolar with many people. They built on that to make more money by allowing other developers to use their platform. However two things come to mind: 1. Competency is not a…

> That is a bit circular to say developers like Apple because they like money, thus Apple is not truly liked for itself.

It's almost as if users patronize Comcast because they like internet access and Comcast is not truly liked for itself. It's almost as if drivers patronize the DMV because they like driving without being arrested and the DMV is not truly liked for itself.

There is a big difference between needing something and liking it.

> Apple was successful in building a platform because it's in house developers were capable of putting together something that was popolar with many people. They built on that to make more money by allowing other developers to use their platform.

But who are they to be allowing anything? GE makes a fine electrical distribution panel but that doesn't mean they get to decide what kind of lamp or microwave or laptop I can use with it.

> 1. Competency is not a moat. If Apple loses developers it's next product will not be so much better than competition that it's success will maintain against erosion.

Network effects are a moat. Apple had the first mover advantage, so they had the initial users and the developers follow the users. Then the users stay because the developers are there and the developers have no choice but to stay if they want access to those users.

The users could switch to Android -- most of them already have. But the developers can't make the remaining users move outside of some sufficiently large organized boycott, which are notoriously difficult to effectuate because of the coordination problem.

> 2. For all people talk about associating with necessary evils; when you associate with someone long enough, you begin to think they are not evil. Thus it seems reasonable to think developers do not hate Apple, if they work with Apple.

By this logic the most beloved entity in the country should be the IRS. And if people had to file four times a year instead of once they would like them even more.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#152

Post by hutzlibu »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #123
hutzlibu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mostly that never happens. " Might be because there are no decentralized competitors to facebook, who offer the same possibilities bugfree. Never seen that.

Same isn't good enough. You need a killer app to get people to switch.

When you offer the same technical possibilities, but coorporation free, that is enough difference to get a critical mass of people to join.

Signal for example still can't compete with WhatsApp on everything, but is good enough now to get some traction.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#153

Post by drb91 »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #117
drb91 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I follow developers hating Apple when 99% of the engineers I see use an apple laptop. As to facebook, we’ll see if it survives. There’s not much to use it for aside from advertising as a platform, and I’ve heard nothing but negatives about return on ads.

Plenty of people hate things they are stuck with for lack of usable alternatives

Maybe. I just don’t see a shred of evidence developers generally hate Apple.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#154

Post by loceng »

yason wrote: post #102

People are lazy and don't care. They're happy to let Facebook host and own their data if they can comment and like friends' videos for that. That's basically fine. From what I can learn from the history the web has mostly been centralised and will continue to be so. To think, all business domains tend to converge into few large companies/services, and finally into duopolies and monopolies if left to their own devices…

The leading metric to change all of this is to develop a person's self-awareness, to connect themselves with themselves more deeply, so they can feel the pull-distraction that ads cause - and understanding the manipulation and general shallow level of information used in ads - and thus feel repulsed by them, and then want to not have them be in their life unexpectedly. If you can't perceive or sense the impact or associate to the impact, then you can't care about it - and caring is what leads to impulse, and action vs. laziness.

It is definitely warrants to be concern and care to have, for safety and security purposes of society as a whole to counter the will of bad actors that perhaps will ebb and flow until the end of time; it's why I believe as a signal point (a canary) for government-citizen relationships, is a deeply embedded law that allows for mesh networks to be always allowed - and so the moment there is an organized crackdown on this, we can know something is up - whether that is capitalistic for-profit efforts of people thinking more selfishly or a bad actor who has malicious and hatred-based goals/impulses.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#155

Post by eksemplar »

spiritcat wrote: post #109
eksemplar wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people are different. :) When I was 20 years younger most developers I knew loved Linux. So maybe she plays in. I know I left gentoo for a Mac in 2006 and I’ve never looked back. I don’t dislike Linux by the way, I just don’t want to spend time configuring things anymore.

perhaps gentoo was not a good fit for you? currently develop on mac but still linux at home

Gentoo was certainly a terrible fit, but I've had my runs with Debian, ubuntu and fedora as well, and it somehow always ends up being configuration hell, which then breaks with some random update, prompting me to do it all over.

These days it's more than that though. I mean, I'm completely drenched in the apple eco-system, and it's kind of nice to get iMessages on my MacBook and sharing data between devices so easily. I now I could setup something similar with stuff like own cloud, but then I'd have to do that, instead of it just working out the box.

Like I said, I don't dislike linux. I've never really disliked an OS until windows 10, but I just don't bother with technology that isn't designed for user experience anymore.

Like my first smartphone was an android, I don't think I'll ever own an android phone again. :p

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#156

Post by PaulHoule »

andrewmutz wrote: post #52
symfoniq wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m seeing less and less developers buy Macs...

In favor of linux? Chrome books?

Windows.

One reason the world is so screwed up in 2018 is that people think they have to get everything for free.

Thus "your smartphone" is really an extension of other people's brands. It's not a tool to control your environment but a way sinister forces in the environment control you.

I like Linux for certain things but since you don't pay for it you influenced by the priorities of those who do pay: IBM, Google, the corporate customers of Red Hat.

Since you do pay for Windows and you do have a choice, Microsoft is working for you and there is an incentive to make the OS better.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#157

Post by mLuby »

lovemenot wrote: post #82
mLuby wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your second point is the critical one, and I'll add to it — there must be an incentive to decentralize, and it must outweigh the numerous incentives to re-centralize. We need to centralize around protocols/standards and decentralize ownership of data. If somehow each piece of data on a user were exponentially more expensive to keep, that might be possible. But that would be a very strange law…

>> If somehow each piece of data on a user were exponentially more expensive to keep, that might be possible. But that would be a very strange law… Dave and I agree with your diagnosis, and we would like to propose a solution. Who is Dave? Well you know him, and I know that you know him and I know that when we both talk about Dave we must be talking about the same person. (mLuby I probably don't really know you, this…

I don't understand. If Eve (who we don't know) adds data like location, age, interests to her profile on our Dave, people will want to access her profile on Dave. This creates an incentive for Eve to aggregate as much data on as many people as possible.

Are you saying that nobody can know which Dave we're talking about unless we identify him as Dave-with-cell-5551234567? I don't think that's true, since human social circles are pretty easy to figure out; see the humorous hypothetical collection of data about US Founding Fathers. http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/phone-spying-paul...

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#158

Post by mmt »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #108
mmt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volunteer (distributed) computing projects demonstrate that even scale can be decentralized.

I’m unaware of any such project that operates on even a hundredth of the scale of the centralized sites that people want to replace. Facebook, Twitter, google, etc.

Perhaps situations that are harder to count, such as botnets or bitcoin, would get closer.

However, even a thousandth of their scale is enough to demonstrate that decentralized scale is possible at the level where there can be economies (or diseconomies).

Google's scale was already huge even when they had merely "more than 10,000 servers" in the years prior to their IPO.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#159

Post by acover »

Vinnl wrote: post #100
acover wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech has a tendency to become monopolistic. Well funded open source competitors seem like a solution as it would allow anyone to compete. Fund the development of software and not the distribution. It would realign incentives to the consumers.

But that's just moving the goalposts: who do you align incentives such that software is funded, not distribution?

One way is to pay for feature requests. Pay $10 a month for you or a proxy to vote on various features to be developed/maintained.

There are multiple ways this could be funded. I don't know if any would work.

Re: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

#160

Post by s17n »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #126
tpxl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If some guy has to effectively stop hosting a forum because of GDPR GDPR does not prevent people from hosting forums

The new Copyright Directive may have that effect though.

GDPR is worse, actually. Both laws are making site owners liable for hosting certain types of content (personal information and copyrighted materials, respectively). However automatically detecting copyrighted materials is relatively straightforward compared but automatically detecting personal information is probably impossible.
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