the internet is even less constrained than the airport network. With practically zero friction keeping it in check, it can centralize completely. So, we can't put our eggs on decentralization, but instead we should put them on competition. Seemingly however, there is no competitor to silicon valley. And the valley itself is extremely anticompetitive and monopolistic, with different parts of the net being consolidated to a few monopolistic giants. our hope for competing ideas in digital networking are going to come from siloed out ecosystems, like china and russia. Indeed, the cold war was a time of great progress in almost everything
Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
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Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#42When framed as extremes in a false dichotomy, centralization seems the better option. In the reality of decentralized social media servers, thousands of community servers of various sizes rather than individuals make up most of the nodes and homes for people. In the current #Twittermigration, the biggest general servers are buckling from the mass inflows of members. More servers are easily springing up to provide new homes. The architects and maintainers of the fediverse anticipated the need to make setup and administration easy, but we were maybe not prepared for such a big pulse. Thanks for the boost Elon.
Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#43You can centralize things... on yourself or your family.
Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#44Hierarchy and centralization are ways to manage complexity and stay efficient as the article correctly points out but one additional point, topological pressures aside is also division of labour and specialization.
Sufficiently large systems benefit more and more from specialization, the emergence of content delivery networks on top of the more generic internet is an example. As the types of content we consume are getting more and more sophisticated, bandwidth heavy and capital intensive, specialized infrastructure and distribution pays off more and more.
For that reason peertube and other alternatives are pretty much structurally doomed. They'll never compete or be as economical as services and infrastructure optimized for that task.
Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#45The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if they do something fishy. It's about the threat, and what can happen on margin. Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is reasonable.
Plus, if these protocols are built on top of cryptographic methods, it might not be so easy for the providers to do something fishy in the first place.
Sure, Binance could run off with your money tomorrow if they wanted you, but if you keep most of your money in your actual Bitcoin wallet and only deposit what you need to, your money is 100% safe.
Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#46Centralization and decentralization happen in waves as a natural result of ossification and complexity growth.
As an example, IBM was once the dominant market force in computation. As the business grew and became increasingly byzantine, it was unable to respond to market changes or market demands in any meaningful way, and therefore the market became decentralized. This happened to Microsoft. If Apple continues on its current path it will happen to Apple. If Google continues on its current path, this will happen to Google. The entire internet was once significantly decentralized both in structure and in content providers. The content got silo'd by a few major players, and it is now swinging back the opposite direction while the structure is becoming increasingly AWS/Azure/Google. This too will eventually start going the opposite direction as those infrastructure providers ossify.
Nothing is forever.
Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#47The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if they do something fishy. It's about the threat, and what can happen on margin. Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is reasonable.
I agree.
A few years ago, I wrote an article on this subject :
hello@joe — greeting, editorial rule and name on the Internet
http://apichat.fr/doku.php?id=hello_joe_greeting_editorial_r...
Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#48Nit: Dunbar’s number is casually used in a way that doesn’t seem relevant here. It’s not true that we can only remember about 150 entities. People know many thousands of words. (It is true that there are limits on what people will remember.)
Dunbar's number is that ON AVERAGE people can only maintain 150 relationships.
"maintaining relationship" is not the same as remembering or knowing the person's name. It is spending enough time with the person that you have an ongoing relationship, which is eased if you remember a number of details about them (job history, hobbies, birthdays, etc).
On average matters because the number is about group size, not any one individual's ability. For the group to cohere, most of the people in the group need to know most of the people in the group.
You will find people who can only manage 100 or fewer relationships, likewise, people who can maintain many more, even orders of magnitude more.
It isn't about the individual. It is about the group.
Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just go and get cash during a bank run. How hard can that be?
That wasn't provided as a condition. In a bank run, Visa's existence or non-existence is irrelevant. Credit is frozen.
Do you really think Visa and Meta could go under without causing a bank run?
Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
#50It is true that power laws are seen everywhere, and that there are reason for those. I like the article, because it exposes very quickly a very powerful idea, but I disagree with the conclusion. Information networks are built by humans, they are designed, they are not necessarily bound by the rules of evolution. Which means we may yet be able to find a system that is not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destructio…
It's very easy to design a system not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction.
The key challenge is that that system, by design, will be less efficient than other competing systems. So if there is a surrounding meta-system that allows it to compete with others, the other systems that tend towards consolidation will drive out your system.
It's essentially the same problem we see in economics today with supply chains. Companies that optimized their supply chains to have more margin made more money and won... as long as the supply chains were all running perfectly. But once COVID happened, it became clear that those businesses had no resilience.