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Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

subconscious.substack.com

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Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#121

Post by dinosaurdynasty »

bombcar wrote: post #79
PontifexMinimus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There are a very few alternate roots that have actually gotten traction - the most famous of which is .onion

.onion is weird in that it isn't actually DNS; it doesn't support DNS records (like A, SRV, TXT, etc) and applications that use it don't use DNS to connect to things behind onion services.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#122

Post by CuriouslyC »

preseinger wrote: post #110
CuriouslyC wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Centralization is better than decentralization in 99% of cases This is way overgeneralizing, and not remotely true for a large swathe of things. Centralized systems are actually less efficient unless the central agent is a party to every interaction due to the nature of the system. If the central agent is only a party by virtue of the imposed structure, you've created overhead, made the system difficult to change,…

> Centralizing mail delivery works well, centralizing economies or ecosystems does not. Take the set of all systems conceivably used by human beings. Email providers, social networks, parent-teacher associations, dungeons and dragons campaign groups, neighborhood watches, everything. Now, classify each of those things into one of two groups: either "more like the USPS" or "more like national economies". What is the r…

If you want to define centralization as humans gathering in groups, I guess.

A large portion of human social interaction is peer to peer though.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#123

Post by andsoitis »

thrown_22 wrote: post #114
mkmk3 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Microsoft: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

What's an example of an open protocol (what this thread is about) where MSFT successfully followed this strategy?

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#124

Post by wslh »

It is much simpler to explain that in this article: centralization is inevitable because the UI/UX you use for entering any protocol (decentralized or not) is centralized. Hence the UI/UX could decide what to show and the order.

It could be call "the listing problem", you can decentralize Amazon (e.g. OpenBazaar) but at the end the app you use to list the product could censor and filter what they want without caring about the protocol behind.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#125

Post by andsoitis »

openfuture wrote: post #107
happytiger wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe it was kind but the tone does not get across the textification. Glad to hear your justifications. They are more persuasive than the initial representation. Thank you for engaging the constructive conversation.. now w.r.t. the power of financial interests, I think it is overestimated and easily shattered but we will just have to see what happens.

> I believe it was kind but the tone does not get across the textification.

I don't know that it is kind to say to someone that they're "full of shit".

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#126

Post by anonporridge »

teddyh wrote: post #73
Ericson2314 wrote: post #29

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.)

> Not if the switching cost is high and/or slow.

This seems to be one of the key goals of Jack Dorsey's bluesky over Mastadon. Mastadon apparently has a lot of friction when trying to switch servers, even though it's a federated protocol. Bluesky claims to want make it much more trivial to take your identity to any provider on the federated network.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#127

Post by happytiger »

openfuture wrote: post #116
happytiger wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry I just read this exchange again and I totally misread your first comment. Tbh I'm a bit tilted at the moment. I'll take a break.

I absolutely love you for this comment. I totally understand and have been there lately myself. Hang in there my friend.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#128

Post by thrown_22 »

andsoitis wrote: post #123
thrown_22 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

What's an example of an open protocol (what this thread is about) where MSFT successfully followed this strategy?

HTML before IE6. At one point Microsoft owned the web browser market to the same degree that Google owns it today.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#129

Post by beefman »

cdata wrote: post #62

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

Have you considered not asking people to agree to rules before joining your Discord?

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#130

Post by andrewflnr »

k__ wrote: post #32
Ericson2314 wrote: post #29

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.

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.

Just to clarify, are you thinking of something like E2EE?
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