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What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

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Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#31

Post by jasode »

netsensei wrote: post #10
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the steps I have to go through to install stuff that I expect thousands of other people must be installing at the same time on a cloud service ridiculously complicated. The same with most tasks. I do however find them doable and maybe also a kind of job security for that reason. But I don't prefer them. I want to build stuff, not do a bunch of prep work every time I want to build stuff.

Decentralisation isn't a collection of technology. Rather, it's a set of principles or tenets. It's above all the by-product of the choices one makes. Sure, you can install a gazillion packages, use serverless, static site generators, SaaS platforms, install CMS x, y or z. But then again, you can still use a simple FTP program, copy HTML files over TCP/IP to a remote server with a process running in the background th…

>Decentralisation - at it's core - is about ownership. If you put content and data on a host, who owns that? You or the owner of the host? This is where the entire discussion becomes a legal debate.

Your analysis that "ownership of data" being the core tenet of decentralization is incorrect. Consider the 3 major examples of centralization complaints:

- Youtube is too centralized. A decentralized alternative is PeerTube. Is this about ownership? No because Youtube's TOS specifically says the uploader to Youtube retains ownership of the content.[1]

- Twitter is too centralized. A decentralized alternative is Mastodon. But it's not about ownership of data. The Twitter TOS says the user retains copyright ownership of the tweets.[2]

- Facebook is too centralized. But again, the various decentralized alternatives do not change the terms of content ownership. Facebook TOS says the user keeps ownership.[3]

What the 3 examples show is that data ownership isn't the issue. The real issues of centralized services are power and audience reach.

If a musician writes an original song and films an music video, and then uploads it to Youtube, the musician retains the data ownership and the intellectual copyrights. Because intellectual property ownership wasn't transferred, Youtube can be seen as a glorified content-delivery-network cache. (And there's the rub... that so-called "cdn" of Youtube has attracted a billion eyeballs.) That means there are different issues that motivates decentralisation; e.g. the power to filter/rank/recommend/censor/demonetize videos. The concentration of massive audience reach in Youtube's centralized service that makes the musician's decision to host his music video on his own home server irrelevant.

I think those 3 examples should trigger a rethink of your mental framework that led you to conclude data ownership is the main issue.

[1] excerpt from https://www.youtube.com/t/terms : 6.C - For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, [...]

[2] excerpt from https://twitter.com/en/tos : You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content). By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, [...]

[3] excerpt from https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms : "You own the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and the other Facebook Company Products you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want. However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a ‘license’) to use this content. This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above. Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, [...]

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#32

Post by [deleted] »

mcguire wrote: post #28
mark_l_watson wrote: post #24

The author of the article wrote a book ‘Everything for Everyone’ that looks interesting. It is about organizing coops as a push back against the gig economy or large corporations. My first job was at what was essentially a huge coop: the 100% employee owned defense contractor SAIC. SAIC spoiled me for all other jobs I had because there was a good vibe and efficiency that came with all employees having a strong motiva…

I worked for SAIC before and after the Leidos split. It may have been a 100% employee-owned "coop", but it was clear that some employees got more out of the success than others. And it was always a government contractor like all of the other contractors out there.

[deleted]

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#33

Post by specialist »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #24

The author of the article wrote a book ‘Everything for Everyone’ that looks interesting. It is about organizing coops as a push back against the gig economy or large corporations. My first job was at what was essentially a huge coop: the 100% employee owned defense contractor SAIC. SAIC spoiled me for all other jobs I had because there was a good vibe and efficiency that came with all employees having a strong motiva…

Thanks. Added to reading list.

Also, nice tidbit about SAIC. It seems that many coops get coopted. Suggesting there's some as yet unknown magic sauce that makes some coops more durable.

I'm very interested in comparative governance models. All tips, links welcome.

I just want someone to point at some real world working organizations.

Kinda like how QA obsessives study the Toyota Production System.

--

I joined a FOSS project structured as multi-org consortium (Kuali) explicitly to learn how they work. (It didn't.)

Richard Wolff's book Democracy at Work advocates WDSE (IIRC, worker directed social enterprises). But, sadly, while Wolff's works are descriptive, he hasn't (yet?) gotten into case studies and prescriptive works.

In the USA, the SEIU and other unions are funding misc coops. IIRC, coops currently employ 1.4m workers. I haven't had the gumption to contact the principals to see how they're doing.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#34

Post by zelly »

Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell.

• your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal

• email server (replace Gmail)

• torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.)

• personal Bitcoin node (replace banking and reliance on centralized Bitcoin miners)

• ActivityPub/Mastodon (replace FB/TWTR)

If you want to message someone, you don't use WhatsApp--you talk directly to their self-hosted XMPP server. You verify your own monetary transactions on your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service. You and your friends participate in your own ActivityPub social network.

There are a lot of problems with this obviously. You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. On centralized networks, you can find someone on the other side of the world just as easily as you could find your neighbor. A decentralized world brings you back in time to where you are more limited to the people in your physical area or the online niches you run in. Do you want to sacrifice globalization to have decentralization?

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#35

Post by AJ007 »

nwah1 wrote: post #20
sweeneyrod wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice. Why do you say that? I see email as an example of very successful decentralisation. GMail etc. have a large share of the market but they don't dominate it, and the different providers interoperate very well.

Most markets exhibit oligopolistic competition, and email is no exception. Google controls the most, yes, but they aren't the only ones to consider. The number of competitors who are significant players are only a handful. The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email. Email being an open protocol allows interoperability and lowers barriers to entry, and all of that is good, but power…

Yes, for example even though gmail dominates, some percentage of users are using other clients. They’ve tried to push users to the gmail client with extra features like automatic sorting, but mostly it’s been a pain in the ass.

We’ve experienced some fake outs with applications like Twitter and Slack which first appeared they were going to allow other clients, and then closed off their systems when reaching a point they didn’t think they needed them anymore.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#36

Post by michaelfeathers »

specialist wrote: post #29

TLDR: Centralization (winner takes all) is the result of preferential attachment. Some kind of downward pressure is required to counterbalance, counteract.

I dug into this topic in this talk in 2017. 'Moving Past the Scaling Myth' The core observation is that minimal spanning trees have less edge cost than fully connected graph - if you pay for the difference you can have decentralization.

Centralization is a cost reduction maneuver.

https://youtu.be/MgbmGQVa4wc?t=700

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#37

Post by sprash »

There are many market participants that push against decentralization at all cost (e.g. one of the reasons Google shut down Google Reader is that RSS does not fit in their business model). Decentralization is always bad news for those who like to control things, own present centralized infrastructure or use gate keeping as a measure to make money.

So just because decentralization is constantly under attack doesn't mean it's bad or even that it "doesn't work" as the author claims. If it works or not can be determined by cryptologists and mathematicians on a case by case basis and not by some "assistant professor of Media Studies" who has actually zero authority in this field.

Of course the protocols that are required to make decentralization possible need to be centralized. But that is a stupid argument. The laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe. That doesn't mean the universe is centralized.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#38

Post by TheRealPomax »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #2

> Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers I'm all for real standards, and believe W3C has acted in good faith, but in what shape is W3C's standardization process now (hint: they cancelled the HTML 5.3 and SVG 2 spec) and where has it lead us?

You know _why_ they cancelled HTML 5.3, right? A different group had (what the world at least concluded was) better ideas for HTML5, took the spec, declared it "living" rather than versioned, and declared itself the authority on HTML. For a while that meant we had _two_ HTML 5 specs, at odds with each other, and eventually W3C had no choice but to acknowledge their coup had succeeded (for better or for worse) because the world ended up siding with WhatWG instead of W3C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Public...

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#39

Post by humanrebar »

zelly wrote: post #34

Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell. • your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal • email server (replace Gmail) • torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.) • personal Bitcoin node (replace…

Fraud is probably a harder problem than discoverability. You can always exchange (maybe through an automated pairing) IPv6 addresses if nothing else. Supporting chargebacks, eliminating spam, blocking phishing, etc. if both harder and more important to a functioning culture.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#40

Post by sweeneyrod »

nwah1 wrote: post #20
sweeneyrod wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in practice. Why do you say that? I see email as an example of very successful decentralisation. GMail etc. have a large share of the market but they don't dominate it, and the different providers interoperate very well.

Most markets exhibit oligopolistic competition, and email is no exception. Google controls the most, yes, but they aren't the only ones to consider. The number of competitors who are significant players are only a handful. The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email. Email being an open protocol allows interoperability and lowers barriers to entry, and all of that is good, but power…

> The top 5 providers likely account for the overwhelming majority of all email. I don't think this is true. At least, it wasn't true in 2016 according to this (https://email-verify.my-addr.com/list-of-most-popular-email-...), these figures (https://emailclientmarketshare.com) for email clients in 2019 don't suggest a massive change, and anecdotally it seems unlikely -- a lot of people use addresses from university or work.

Certainly it is more centralised than say the automotive industry. But it seems much more similar to that than operating systems, browsers, social networks etc..

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