111–120 of 158 posts
Centralization and its opposite are extremely general concepts. You can't have a conversation about them because they mean nothing without specific context. Adding "the internet " or "the web" doesn't help because they're very vague too. It's like talking about "drinks" versus "not-drinks".
The 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.
Not if the switching cost is high and/or slow. The problems of a monarchy will not be solved by setting up a competing neighboring kingdom. To bring the topic back to networking, it has been said that decentralization is the worst form of networking except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (With apologies to Winston Churchill.)
That was how the US grew between 1700 and 1914. Everyone in Europe sick of monarchies just moved out to the new world.
When there isn't a finite amount of land to squat it becomes a viable long term solution.
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You are correct. The greatest threat to someone providing a service based on an open protocol is that users might pick up and leave. Consequently, a service provider will plow enormous resources into differentiating their service, and generating other lock-in effects, so the users find it hard to leave. A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist. The monopolist can…
> A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist. Whereas when there's no popular open source protocol, the OSS ecosystem upgrades itself fast, like a cheetah? :P Whatever mental model you're using here might just be going over my head and I'd appreciate you being more explicit about it
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Sorry but you are full of shit. Centralization is not digitization. Centralization is relying on the use of coercion. It's a /central/ source of truth. The identity system we've been stuck with since WW1 will finally be replaced with something decentralized and approaching fair thanks to digitization. What we're lacking is the software that gives individuals self sovereignty.
That’s not a very kind response. I’d love to have a constructive conversation rather than resorting to base name calling. I mean to say that centralization is caused by digitization because of the financial incentives, not that centralization IS digitization. And all of our current systems are systems of legacy control. In fact I generally agree with you. Generally the identity system will be interrupted, and at the…
Plug: I'm working with the author on a decentralized protocol for networked thought and a companion browser called Subconscious. We're a very young project and just getting off the ground. If you're interested in topics like the one in the article, all our work is open source and we love getting into it with folks on Github or our Discord (link in the README): https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere
yet you choose two closed source centralized solutions for your project: Github and Discord
Seriously though, I would be happy to have a polite discussion about the reason for our choices in our Discord server!
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Beyond network effect, nope. This is one of the more convenient ways to block in-app ads on mobile. Set your DNS to something like AdGuard's servers, and they'll resolve ad delivering domains to a no-op. And suddenly all major third party ads in apps or the web alike are gone.
> Beyond network effect, nope. So why does no-one do this/ Obviously people do do it for ad-blocking, so why not for other purposes? Too difficult to get traction, perhaps?
If I decide I want to have my personal website be called google.com I can edit my hosts file to point google.com to my webserver and everything works for me, but anybody else going to google.com is going to get Google's page instead unless I somehow convince them to edit their files or use my weird DNS server.
Even if I come up with some great reason that makes people want to accept that google.com is better when it goes to my website instead, what happens when someone else decides they should be able to use google.com for something else and they convince a bunch of people to use their weird DNS server? We could fragment the DNS all over the place and have several conflicting entries for every popular domain name depending on what DNS server you're using but is that really better?
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yet you choose two closed source centralized solutions for your project: Github and Discord
"We should improve society somewhat..." Seriously though, I would be happy to have a polite discussion about the reason for our choices in our Discord server!
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Beyond network effect, nope. This is one of the more convenient ways to block in-app ads on mobile. Set your DNS to something like AdGuard's servers, and they'll resolve ad delivering domains to a no-op. And suddenly all major third party ads in apps or the web alike are gone.
> Beyond network effect, nope. So why does no-one do this/ Obviously people do do it for ad-blocking, so why not for other purposes? Too difficult to get traction, perhaps?
OpenNIC has a lot of non-ICANN domains but runs in a fashion similar to ICANN (central organization deciding rules for TLDs). Iirc there are some small non-US communities that use this a lot.
There are also a decent amounts of crypto TLDs (.bit for namecoin, Ethereum has a couple, etc).
There are of course a lot of corporations that use custom DNS domains for internal purposes, like .corp or .internal or the like.
It is difficult to get people to change their DNS serves en masse to something non-standard. The lack of being able to get real TLS certificates is also an issue though there is work in this direction: OpenNIC is developing a traditional CA afaik and namecoin has some experimental stuff to support DNSSEC and TLSA to have TLS certs enforced by the blockchain.