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The case for the decentralization of online forums

viksit.com

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Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#81

Post by robinsonb5 »

hayst4ck wrote: post #47
janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

> and very few people actually want to pay for it. I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe in. Works for the public deserve public (distinct from government) funding. There are many things that say "if you don't give us money, we can't continue to exist." "We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments." Reddit's enshitification[…

> "We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments."

It's almost as though the large-scale abandonment of old-skool small-scale, independent domain-specific web forums in favour of huge centralised platforms was a mistake...

(Just out of interest, can anyone give me an idea of the typical running costs of, say, a phpBB or vBulletin web forum with a couple of hundred users?)

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#82

Post by ilyt »

rsync wrote: post #17

We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable and enriching forums currently online. What's wrong with HN ? What's wrong with metafilter ? What's wrong with letsrun or doom9 ? The problem is the mistaken notion that these can be big businesses. If you can let go of the economics there is no technical - or usability - hurdle. We know…

Well, there are fundamentally 2 problems here:

* someone needs to pay for it

* whoever is doing and managing that can turn bad and want more.

How do you solve that to be immune to the reddit/stackoverflow disruption ?

Even if it could be covered by donations it there is still problem of any inevitable management of it deciding to push it in direction different than community wishes.

> We are holding this discussion on a classic, centralized, web1.0 forum which - from my vantage point - is one of the most valuable and enriching forums currently online.

Not web 1.0. Usenet and mailing lists(mostly) died for that, as did many "traditional" forums.

> We know this because we're already doing it right here.

Ok, now look up who is paying for that.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#83

Post by digitallyfree »

janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

If we look at this from a technical perspective, what is the cost of running such a service?

Something like Facebook obviously costs a lot more to run, as it stores photos and video and also provides each user with an individually generated feed. In contrast HN is rather lightweight and basically serves mostly static cachable content to all users. I believe it was stated somewhere that the entire HN comfortably runs on a 64GB 4/8 bare metal server. On the extreme side I host my personal static web site on my home DSL connection fronted by Cloudflare, as the CDN does all the work and the bandwidth used is minimal.

To the people running these new communities the software cost is low as they're based off an open-source service of choice (Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.), and as we saw on Reddit moderation can be done by volunteers. Are the remaining costs for admins, hosting, etc. feasible for a non-profit with some user donations? And can we create more efficient platforms with a plainer style that will minimize the server and electricity costs?

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#84

Post by elwebmaster »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #81
hayst4ck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and very few people actually want to pay for it. I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe in. Works for the public deserve public (distinct from government) funding. There are many things that say "if you don't give us money, we can't continue to exist." "We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments." Reddit's enshitification[…

> "We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments." It's almost as though the large-scale abandonment of old-skool small-scale, independent domain-specific web forums in favour of huge centralised platforms was a mistake... (Just out of interest, can anyone give me an idea of the typical running costs of, say, a phpBB or vBulletin web forum with a cou…

Mostly it was just the cost of the domain since there was free hosting all over the place. You could also just run it in an old PC in your bedroom, not sure how much electricity that used as I was not paying electricity at the time :) but mostly the problem is simultaneous users, 100 users is ok as long as they are not all making requests at the same time. Anyways, with modern frameworks it would be practically free.

But the SEO and marketing costs to get any kind of traction these days are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the real reason we can’t have decentralized communities anymore, the big guys have formed oligopoly. They control the market and prevent any competition by owning user attention.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#85

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

CPLX wrote: post #35
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is centralized. It all sits on one server run without a declared public mandate of openness like Wikipedia. A decentralized fora would be Usenet which is designed as a federation of independent servers storing and exchanging data.

I understand the technical point being made but it seems to be missing the point. Why isn’t it good enough to have a whole bunch of idiosyncratic privately run discussion forum communities spread across many different websites and servers and so on? We had that before Reddit and many examples still exist, it seems like it was closer to the ideal than Usenet ever was.

Because such systems are brittle. Bespoke forums disappear and their archival status may be incomplete or hard to search. We have nearly all of Usenet preserved in multiple places.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#86

Post by than3 »

bnralt wrote: post #80
janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

That's an issue, but I don't think that's the main issue. There's plenty of ways around that if the will is there. Worst case scenario you could just create an old-school mailing list. Everyone has the infrastructure for that already in place, and plenty of close communities were built around them ~30 years ago. However, there's two big things standing in the way: 1. The vast majority of the population - I'd say at l…

That's flawed in a few ways.

With regard to #1

The vast majority of the population are seeking to fill some need when they get online. Its not about popularity, popularity only provides exposure.

Its whether that need is being satisfied, both at the time they choose to jump ship, and continuing on into the future. Also, almost everyone born after the 90s has been indoctrinated prior to the age of reason that they can go online and find anything they might need, addiction triggers and other psychological traps await. There is also, as always, the ever present coercion through concentration of business sectors into a few entities who play shell games and limit your agency and choice. In some places you can't apply for college anymore using paper, its all digital and digital systems break when they aren't properly designed for resilience; these result in less opportunities acting as a filter and coercively limiting those who fall into the implementation cracks with no other choice.

#2 is purely normative, and neglects abuse which may include jamming communications or something more subtle but still malign. This view is filled with supposition, and makes broad over-generalizations, its non-sequitur.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#87

Post by ilyt »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #62
janoc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet was literally decentralized before this was even a buzzword.

You're right. When I think of 'decentralized', and what I meant, was something offering anonymity and resistance to takedown orders, which are things it didn't have real protection against.

And a way to fight spam. You don't want users to be too anonymous, else someone can just post bullshit with zero ways to fight it.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#88

Post by hayst4ck »

viksit wrote: post #72
janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

(author here) your point is well taken. in the article, one of the main reasons i say that while it’s important to not get caught in the crypto jargon - it’s also important to not ignore the technology paradigm behind it. giving people an incentive to run a server by the populace that uses it is a well defined and well known way to run decentralized services. staking and validating are concepts that have gotten very…

The core problem with decentralization is anonymity at scale.

Creating an account per decentralized unit is a high cost. Fighting abuse of a platform on the scale of decentralized units rather than the platform as a whole is a very high cost. How does a decentralized platforms perform against an adversarial attacker (spammers/nation states/etc)?

You have addressed the idea of centralization by talking about what it does well, but you have failed to address what decentralization does poorly. Namely, turning O(1) problems into O(N) problems.

How do decentralized organizations handle conflict/how do you prevent schism?

Email was very decentralized, but spam never got dealt with until email was nearly entirely centralized on gmail. So why could e-mail never successfully fight spam before centralization?

I don't think your post attempted to explain the forces that led us towards centralization in the first place and what the benefits of that centralization were.

I don't think decentralization is obviously better or worse than centralization, I think there are a series of tradeoffs that make different styles of platform better under different contexts. I think a "good king" centralized platform will beat a decentralized one until it doesn't (which is what we are experiencing right now), which means that during the reign of the "good king" the cost of decentralization is higher and therefore unappealing.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#89

Post by elwebmaster »

hayst4ck wrote: post #61
rcarr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fundamentally the problem. Far too much money is being extracted from the system by landlords and banks (via mortgages) for no productive labour rather than being spent on actual productive things like internet forums, the actual cost to produce food without subsidies etc. When people have more money to spend because they’re not paying half their take home pay on rent or a mortgage, they’re generally more ame…

The money is being extracted through limiting housing supply and lack of infrastructure investments that support high density (efficient) housing. Increasing housing supply means decreasing homeowner capital and harming the major investment vehicle of a generation. That's politically untenable. Sadly, the pain will be felt by us and our children until we are able to exercise political power, which will require harmin…

This comment is spot on. 100% of the reason for high housing costs is western governments’ limits on supply. People need a place to live, that’s the reality. If supply is artificially suppressed, prices will keep rising as long as old housing ages (and what can stop aging?) and population continues to grow.

Re: The case for the decentralization of online forums

#90

Post by colinsane »

janoc wrote: post #37

The problem is that people think that decentralization somehow solves the problem. It doesn't. In most cases, like Reddit or Twitter or Mastodon or whatever the issue isn't that something is centralized but that things actually do cost money to build and run . Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it. That is why the various efforts to monetize the con…

> things actually do cost money to build and run.

how much does HN cost to keep running, again? didn’t Stack Overflow notoriously run on hardware not that different from what some passionate devs keep in their home?

the hardware is cheap enough that the BoM cost angle is debatable today and will only be less true over time. the other costs (time commitments) fall into well-known buckets: moderation, and development. Reddit, Discord, etc are already moderated by unpaid users. lots of open source development already happens without money or an expectation of any return on capital.

you’re sort of implicitly denying that bbforums and such could ever be a dominant mode of online community, despite that at one point they were. if community aggregators (Reddit) is what displaced many of those independently-run forums, then today’s federation is something of an attempt to force that role back open and allow independently-run forums an even playfield.

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