The Future Is Decentralized

In the end, aren't you still in a cesspool?

You're saying 4chan is healthy, perhaps because you have an affinity for it? My daughter and her friends believe tiktok is healthy, again, because they have an affinity for it. I understand that people find their communities in these centralized places. That said, having an affinity for one centralized website or another doesn't make that centralized website necessarily "healthy".

You may argue, "But Ah Haaa Bilbo0s!!! Decentralizing these sites won't make the decentralized places any less cesspool-like than the centralized versions." Perhaps not, but health and clean content are not really the point of decentralization, distributed control is the point.

We shouldn't confuse our own tribe's centralized system as the ideal of "healthy". Someone downthread here put it best:

When people mention "community-focused", they often omit that the community refers to their own community

This repeated thinking that "open protocols" will create an escape from centralized institutions is flawed.

After reading hundreds of essays on "decentralization", most of them ignore the following fundamental economic issues:

- open protocol specifications (RFC drafts, ActivityPub whitepaper, open source implementation on Github, etc) -- all of them -- do not put money in everyone's bank account to _pay_ for running that protocol. (My previous comments about this.[0][1])

- protocols do not provide humans assistants such as system administrators or a salaried staff of IT workers to run & maintain decentralized systems for others. (E.g. my previous comment[2] that us uber geeks on HN know how to run Git but it doesn't matter because we don't have the time nor enthusiasm to run decentralized git on our home laptop, or Gitlab on Raspberry Pi to serve our repos to others. It's easier to just use centralized Github.)

If you're thinking that money and staffing are "out of scope" for a decentralized open protocol RFC, you are correct! But that's also why decentralized protocols don't lead to the decentralized utopia that enthusiasts envision. Consider that both the protocols TCPIP an HTTP are already decentralized -- and yet one decentralized node spelled "thefacebook.com" (and later changed to "facebook.com") is now feared as too centralized. Think deeply about how & why that happened. If your mental framework is limited to thinking about "protocols", Facebook being centralized is a mysterious contradiction to decentralized tcpip/http. However, if your mental model includes economic forces, there is no contradiction.

>web remains community-focused and user-oriented, just like it was originally intended to be.

Yes, Tim Berners-Lee developed the open http protocol and also open HTML language but he was originally trying to get scientists to share their data more easily. He and his colleagues' salaries and their computers and servers to run http+html were paid for by the government. His decentralized vision didn't scale out to a billions of users because most everybody else doesn't have the same financial situation. The missing discussion about economics is the same missing factor in his newer SOLID project to re-decentralize the web.[3]

If everyone keeps writing essays on "open protocols" as being the savior from centralized behemoths, we're not advancing the discussion. We're actually going backwards. Look at history to see that open protocols do not achieve that goal as intuition would lead you to believe. Instead, integrate realistic economic incentives into your predictions for a decentralized future and write new essays that take that into account. Think about why the original Bitcoin whitepaper didn't predict that mining would shift from a wide open democracy of home computers to a handful of miners in China. Even the open protocol of Bitcoin blockchain couldn't prevent economic incentives to consolidate into mining pools. A protocol can't stop a handful of miners in China to spend more money on custom ASIC chips and run thousands of them in datacenters to shift the balance of blockchain power from the hobbyists that mined on home computers with AMD graphics cards.

Maybe a thought experiment in a different domain to help break out of "open protocol" thinking: The blockbuster film industry of English-language movies is too "centralized" in Hollywood. Hmmm... so let's create a new language (maybe Esperanto?) so that it breaks the power of Hollywood and 1000 decentralized film communities making Esperanto movies can flourish in places like Alabama and Montana. Well, Esperanto or any other synthesized language will not solve the centralization problem. The English language is already decentralized. You're proposed solution is at the wrong level of abstraction. Look at the economics. (E.g. millions of dollars to pay for desirable actors and special efx is out of reach for most hobbyists regardless of the spoken language.)

[0] "openness of a protocol" idealism such the early tcpip internet leaves out the fact that governments paid the salaries of people to implement a protocol and also paid for the computers to run a protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960

[1] Signal protocol is open and free (free-as-in-speech) but there are still economic forces (not free-as-in-beer) that affect decentralized deployment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499

[2] decentralization works against the aggregate choices of how most people want to allocate their time & money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535703

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=SOLID+decentralized