Distributed Everything

A lot of my friends who use IRC as a primary communication channel will stick to invite-only self-hosted SILC IRC networks. These are essentially 1 step above darknet (eg: local IRCd), and are a far cry from the efnets of the IRC-verse.

I think that statement was more concerned with censorship than privacy.

Are they not one and the same? Take a look at Edward Snowden.

While I do agree to some extent with this post, it is naive in a lot of places. Forgive me if this comes across as picking at the post, but I feel that some of these things need to be said.

  > You know the sources. You’re all on them. [...] Shitter.

While Twitter is grouped with all of these others, I don't find Twitter to be on the same level as Facebook or Google Plus. Maybe it's just me, but I view it as a very large, public forum/chat. (I guess I'm in minority here?) Chatting on Freenode in a public channel isn't necessarily any more private than Twitter.

  > When you use these services, you’re not even a button
  > pushing Starbucks at Barista. You’re just ordering a
  > free latte at hypothetical ad-sponsored Starbucks of the
  > future. You’re not even pushing the button.You’re just a
  > user.

This is misleading. People contributing to Medium are creating content. They are not passively consuming content via YouTube, or only posting ephemeral content via Twitter. Just look at the post that you created. Sure it's published via a 'central' service, but you are not a 'drone' just regurgitating content or providing little to no value to your readers. The real danger in centralized services is when they eclipse everything else. The inflection point where they become a blackhole, sucking everything else in (e.g. long-form blog posts aren't read by a large audience if they aren't on Medium) is the real danger.

  > So, being that I wanted to continue to send more emails,
  > I stopped using the word Bitcoin in emails.

The MailChimp/Tiny Letter issue is an issue of centralization caused by the downsides of decentralization. It becomes increasingly hard to deal with email as the 'small guy' because:

1. You need to be a big guy to make any head-way with making sure your emails are blacklisted by the 'big guys' (e.g. Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail).

2. Email is hard because of the cat-and-mouse game that email admins must play with spammers. If email was a centralized service, spammers would probably be easier to block. Decentralization is also a double-edged sword.

This leads to less competition in the email market because it's a hassle that few people want to deal with when deciding to start a new business.

  > So as more and more people started using these services,
  > I noticed the level of the conversations around me
  > dropping closer to the kind of conversations people have
  > in kindergarten.

Unfortunately this is what happens when you draw in more and more of the general public. You can't solve this issue with decentralization, unless your decentralized solution sets the bar high enough that these people just choose not to participate.

  > You don’t accidentally end up inside someone’s public
  > furry porn collection

Most people don't view accidentally stumbling into someone else's furry porn collection as an upside. You're never going to get many people to 'sign up'(1) for something like this.

(1) I'm not talking about signing up for a centralized service. Just 'signing up' as in joining in.

  > You have no idea how to type HTML anymore. You have no
  > idea how to deploy a Node.js application. You have no
  > idea how to create a link to another website.

If you ever think that the general public is going to want to write HTML or deploy Node.js applications, then you have another thing coming. This is like suggesting that everyone should learn how to repair their car to avoid getting screwed by shady mechanics. It doesn't hold up in the real world. It might be nice, but it's a pipe dream.

  > Don’t just log out. Delete your accounts. This will
  > force you to learn how to use the Internet the hard way.

I appreciate the sentiment, but how many people has, "Go start coding in Vim and disable the arrow keys to learn," convinced? And this is among the 'tech elite.' I don't understand how you think that this is convincing argument for the general public.

  > Host your own web server. Get your own VPS (Digital
  > Ocean is only $5 a month) and host your own web server.

First, the 'distributed vs. centralized' debate needs to have terms defined. Sure, Facebook is definitely centralized, and P2P is definitely decentralized, but what about hosting your own server? It's more decentralized to host your own server than something like Facebook, but the government can still just ask your hosting provider for access to your server without a warrant. So how has this really helped us?

It's made it harder for the government to get access to your data because data is now in lots of little silos rather than a handful of huge ones, but it's still not the panacea that it's presented as here.

To hook into the coffee shop analogy, Starbucks is like Facebook, centralized. The stovetop expresso maker is more like P2P in being decentralized. Hosting your own server? That's more like renting an expresso maker at a community-center. Technically you don't own the expresso maker, even though you are renting/leasing it. At any time, the expresso maker could be used be someone else if that's what your lease agreement allows (e.g. hosting agreements that are pretty open-ended with respect to cooperation with law enforcement).

  > Deploy using Node.js using Bitters.

I'm not entirely sure why Node.js is constantly used as an example. Is this somehow 'distributed' vs. Rails/Django which are 'centralized?'

  > Duckduckgo. The search engine that gets you out of your
  > filter bubble, and respects your privacy.

Unfortunately there are a few issues here:

1. Duckduckgo is dependent on Yahoo! for its search data. Sure, they aren't sending usage statistics back to Yahoo! (so far as I know), but how free are we really from the giant data silos when we are still connected to them for things like search data. If usage of Duckduckgo ever got to the point that it would be severely cutting into Google or Yahoo!'s bottom-line, then the program would probably be terminated.

2. Duckduckgo is good, but not at the same level of functionality as the big players. Many people have attempted to switch to DDG over the recent NSA revelations, only to switch back to Google.

3. DDG doesn't scale. The 'solution' here seems to be to have everyone switch from Bing/Google/Yahoo! to DDG. Then DDG becomes the big silo and the NSA targets them instead. What have we really won, then?

The only thing that DDG really does is increase competition in the web search market, but if we are to attempt to hold the web search engine market to the distributed ideal we are discussing, then what we really need is something else.

Google makes its money by being a directory service to the decentralized internet. Centralized services are at best neutral (G+), and at worst a direct threat (Facebook).

The first thing anyone does when they want to use a darknet-style web is bookmark a directory service. If decentralization ever becomes popular enough, that's just reason to create "google tor search".