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Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

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Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#131

Post by TulliusCicero »

lorean_victor wrote: post #79
TulliusCicero wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized social media sounds better in theory, but in practice is less effective. People are voting with their feet. Or phones, I suppose. It's like all the FOSS types who yelled about how IRC is superior as millions migrated to Slack and Discord. Your bullet point list is nothing in the face of usability.

its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable? as a content consumer I would love to be somewhere where there is engaging content and content discovery. I go to mastodon, my feed is empty and the search doesn't work. I bounce. as a content publisher, I would go wherever the audience is. I go to mastodon, users have a hard time finding me, no one gets my stuff. I bounce. now I (per…

> do you think reddit is truly usable?

Compared to federated equivalents? Oh yeah, definitely.

That's not to say it doesn't have other problems, but casually following subreddits and commenting on them is super easy, and you don't have to worry about which subs federate with other ones, or where your Mastodon account actually is or anything.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#132

Post by theamk »

theK wrote: post #109
theamk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually can't imagine what are the possibilities the personal web server gives me, compared to github pages or cloudflare pages or tons of other super cheap web hosts. Ease of use / nice design tools? You don't need a new protocol for it, create your web editor and add plugins for common providers. Your website would be accessible from any browser, nicely solving chicken-and-egg problems. Free domain names? Plenty…

> if you say "IPFS", then you still need to sign up with some centralized service Ipfs actually has some inbuilt cashing, so visitors to your site also take part of the load and can serve your assets when your PC/internet is down. All without pinning, purely based on GC timing. So as long as you are online reasonably often and your content has readers you will be fine. Another idea has been to make it so that bookmar…

How much data can you reliably cache this way, though, especially with bookmark approach? Even free website providers give you gigabyte of space or more, and you are competing with them.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#133

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

s9df898r32h wrote: post #113
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having any LoRa hardware, I've been imaging just using Bluetooth to gossip updates with people in the same elevator, at the same stoplight... I'd love to build something useful that could tolerate a transport layer like that

One thing that pisses me off is that Google never implemented WiFi "Ad hoc" networking on Android (reducing the probably of decentralized networks taking off). But I would also love to see something like this going.

When I work on that project I often consider it as a weapon against the Googles of the world, so it's not surprising that they haven't made things easy. If we want to cut them out of the loop we're going to have to rebuild some of that loop.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#134

Post by andoando »

godelski wrote: post #102
andoando wrote: post #94

Im confused. You can already set up your own fediverse server, just as you can host your own personal blog. Decentralization is just a parameter of how many people choose to join an existing server or create their own.

The problem with fediverse style setups is that they tend to become highly centralized. Email being a great example. It's often pointed to as a perfect example of federation but naive because when highly centralized it only slightly reduces issues of full centralization. So the question is how you be federated while being highly decentralized. This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be…

Sure, whats fundamentally difficult about setting up a federated instance? Its just a db, and backend/frontend service. You can put in a docker container and run it in minutes.

Things tend to get centralized because users want to be where users are. Developing another platform doesn't change that. Even if that platform just straight up does not allow centralization, it doesn't stop people from using centralized platforms.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#135

Post by samatman »

sureglymop wrote: post #107
samatman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit's address space is 128 bits wide, so scarcity is physically impossible, unless there were a need for every atom in the observable universe to have many addresses. The decision to make the bottom 32 bits valuable was a clever one, but it's lead to some misunderstanding of how things actually work. Specifically, planets (a 32 bit address) only own an additional 2^32 addresses, called moons. That leaves 2^64 of th…

Why does it have to be so obscure? Why planets, moons, etc? It doesn't serve any purpose other than confusing anyone not familiar with it and making those familiar with it seem like the "all knowing" in group.

It depends on what you consider obscure, I guess. A planet is a /32, a star is a /16, a galaxy is an /8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing...

Moons are the /0 subdomain you get with a /32 aka planet, and comets are the 64 bits of free address space left over in the 128 bits of address width. To create a comet, you make a public-private keypair where the public key hash doesn't collide with owned address space. If you miss, you spin up another keypair and keep going until you get one.

That's really the whole thing. These things need names, as evidence, I present the fact that in IPv4, they have names. To my taste "slash eight" is more obscure than "galaxy", your mileage may vary.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#136

Post by anacrolix »

x3haloed wrote: post #85

I’ve also been thinking about this problem for a while. The push model and account portability are definitely the most important dimensions of this issue. Can’t we just solve this problem with IPFS? And something like DHT tables for protocol-level awareness of state changes? Your client app would just be responsible for pushing and pinning content to IPFS, scanning state tables for interesting updates, and then sendi…

There's nothing simple or reliable about IPFS.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#137

Post by godelski »

andoando wrote: post #134
godelski wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with fediverse style setups is that they tend to become highly centralized. Email being a great example. It's often pointed to as a perfect example of federation but naive because when highly centralized it only slightly reduces issues of full centralization. So the question is how you be federated while being highly decentralized. This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be…

Sure, whats fundamentally difficult about setting up a federated instance? Its just a db, and backend/frontend service. You can put in a docker container and run it in minutes. Things tend to get centralized because users want to be where users are. Developing another platform doesn't change that. Even if that platform just straight up does not allow centralization, it doesn't stop people from using centralized platf…

Try setting up a Matrix server[0]. Or Mastadon[1].

This isn't hard for people like you and me, or probably most of HN. But it is difficult for the public. It is hard to set up. It is hard to keep up. It's costly.

I think maybe a good comparison is to PGP. PGP's greatest flaw was that you could reply back that you couldn't decrypt and the sender would resend the message decrypted. Encryption hasn't made its way into the mainstream until companies like Signal showed it could be easy, and then it was picked up by WhatsApp and iMessage.

I'm with you that it isn't "hard", but you need to recognize that this is a comparative word and that not everyone is like us.

[0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/

[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#138

Post by lorean_victor »

godelski wrote: post #137
andoando wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, whats fundamentally difficult about setting up a federated instance? Its just a db, and backend/frontend service. You can put in a docker container and run it in minutes. Things tend to get centralized because users want to be where users are. Developing another platform doesn't change that. Even if that platform just straight up does not allow centralization, it doesn't stop people from using centralized platf…

Try setting up a Matrix server[0]. Or Mastadon[1]. This isn't hard for people like you and me, or probably most of HN. But it is difficult for the public. It is hard to set up. It is hard to keep up. It's costly. I think maybe a good comparison is to PGP. PGP's greatest flaw was that you could reply back that you couldn't decrypt and the sender would resend the message decrypted. Encryption hasn't made its way into t…

even for me, as a long time software engineer (who has worked devops before cloud and docker times), its not "hard" but it is "non-trivial" and can get "costly", while publishing my static blog is waay waaay easier (and hence doable).

I mean look at email again. how many people, even technically proficient people, setup their own email server? we've mostly just accepted google's dominance in the area and are ok with them even leveraging it to impose sometimes ridiculous rules of who can send email to whom and how it will be presented. why should the fediverse end up differently, if the basics are quite similar (if not a bit more complicated)?

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#139

Post by sedatk »

lorean_victor wrote: post #118
sedatk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People tend to forget that we had everything decentralized in the first place, then centralized them for the sake of convenience: Email -> GMail, IRC -> Slack, RSS -> Social Media, Blog -> Medium, Forums -> Reddit and so forth. And basically, convenience won big time. These are not mutually exclusive though. We need decentralized services to fight discrimination and censorship. But, I agree that there is also disprop…

I wouldn't characterise the history of the internet as having started with "everything decentralised". if I'm not missing something, it was completely the other way around. introduction of general populous to the internet was through internet gatekeepers like aol or msn, with unimaginable convenience (and centralisation). that convenience lost, in the end, to the world wide web, where a ton of single individuals coul…

I mean, yes, you're missing something, the first and foremost, Internet. :) Its sole purpose was to solve the information access problem in a decentralized way. That was the rationale behind the ARPANET project.

Then, DNS came, which is also a decentralized solution to the name resolution problem. BGP routing is also similarly decentralized. World Wide Web itself is decentralized. IRC is decentralized. These technologies predate almost everything you mentioned.

I agree with your sentiment that it's mostly a cycle. I just wanted to emphasize that decentralization had never been a novel idea. We've always had decentralization, it's not like a new revolutionary thing as it's presented. That's my point.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#140

Post by lorean_victor »

simonpure wrote: post #14

PubSubHubbub aka WebSub [0] is an extension of RSS feeds to solve the push/pull issue by introducing hubs. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub

yes I think that'd be a great addition. any publisher can, optionally, introduce a hub for their feed, so people get realtime update of their content, and even a social hub, where other authors reacting to their content can use to notify them (and ease the aggregation of these "reactions"). I suspect that can lead to a situation where there are a few hubs and social hubs that anyone can use for their choosing.
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