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Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#171

Post by reader_mode »

wyqydsyq wrote: post #146
notyourday wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

> No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com Except for, oh, I don't know, maybe https://mail.com/ ?

Wow, you get this popup on the site :

    Note: Your browser version is outdated. We recommend using the new Firefox Browser. Download now for free!
My browser is up-to-date, their "download now" link takes you to their own download page with a custom Firefox download. They seem like call center scammer level scum. Wonder why Mozzila is allowing them to use their trademarks like this.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#172

Post by meowface »

quelsolaar wrote: post #29

Whats the biggest downside to having all the data? You are responsible for it. Google, Twitter and Facebook, store and link to data and are therefor responsible for all kinds of things, like keeping porn away from kids, securing data, dealing with privacy, verifying age, dealing with local laws, managing the needs of rights holders, moderating discussions, deciding if Donald trump should be banned or not and so on, a…

>A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.

This doesn't sidestep the core problem of curation, though. It depends on the nature of the application, but just looking at ones that involve displaying user-submitted publicly: if you don't have a frontend with some manner of filtering and moderation, the app will quickly be overwhelmed with a flood of spam and illicit activity (ranging from copyright infringement to child abuse).

Things like IPFS work great for decentralized content storage if you don't need to provide any sort of curation or frontend. But if you do, you'll quickly find yourself running what reduces to a centralized platform. Or if you're providing a federated service of some kind, then your users will be the ones who find themselves in that situation.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#173

Post by lrvick »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #151
wyqydsyq wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could never do on their own server I'm sure most normal people could install SpamAssassin and configure it to use community blacklists on their Dovecot/Postfix server. It's not that hard.

I run a mailinabox server for almost half a year and gmail is a pita. I send an email to a gmail user and it always goes into spam. I have to phone them to unspam it but next day same thing. Yahoo mail or others dont seem have this issue because I have 10/10 on the dkim something scorecard. Google somehow wants to force me to not use my email server. Fuck them

Do you have a residential IP?

It you don't have dmarc enabled that is for sure worth doing too.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#174

Post by lrvick »

godelski wrote: post #125
thesausageking wrote: post #12

The author's definition of what makes a "decentralized application" is too strong and I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server. To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. You can bu…

> To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. I'm confused, because it seems like you agree with the author. She says >> My statement that email can be used without involving Google is technically true, but anyone they blacklist will quickly realise that they’re largely locked out of the glob…

I have moved email provider multiple times without any of that pain. It is easy. I just point my domain name at new MX servers.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#175

Post by berkes »

> The decentralised web does still work, but I feel it’s important to acknowledge that this isn’t how most people use the web.

This is what many people, author included, get wrong.

'Success' needs another defenition with decentralization, (and OpenSource, but that's not what this article is about) than with proprietary apps.

The absolute amount of users of Bitcoin, matrix, email, IPFS, mastodon and so on, is growing. In a staggering rate. The relative amounts are poor, but that really does not make it a failure.

But even if numbers dwindle, they hardly matter for making it a success. IRC is a massive success, because it allowed thousands of people to communicate for decades. And it paved the way for how we all work today. It's not an accident that Slack i see often called 'IRC done right', or so.

Decentralized apps are free by their nature, hard to monetize, the author made this central to her piece. But that means you need another defenition of success!

Bitcoin is a success the moment one single unbanked person can use it to store wealth or pay a friend. XMPP is a success the moment just two people can use it to communicate. Email is a success as long as one person runs it's own server that can deliver mail. Matrix is a success the moment one surpressed idea can be spread to one other person. And so on.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#176

Post by kybernetikos »

godelski wrote: post #125
thesausageking wrote: post #12

The author's definition of what makes a "decentralized application" is too strong and I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server. To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. You can bu…

> To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. I'm confused, because it seems like you agree with the author. She says >> My statement that email can be used without involving Google is technically true, but anyone they blacklist will quickly realise that they’re largely locked out of the glob…

Moving gmail to my own fastmail was really easy.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#177

Post by auggierose »

berkes wrote: post #175

> The decentralised web does still work, but I feel it’s important to acknowledge that this isn’t how most people use the web. This is what many people, author included, get wrong. 'Success' needs another defenition with decentralization, (and OpenSource, but that's not what this article is about) than with proprietary apps. The absolute amount of users of Bitcoin, matrix, email, IPFS, mastodon and so on, is growing.…

Talking about getting it wrong, it's "definition".

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#178

Post by mariusor »

I think that the observation that big players just walk into a federated service and then tend to dominate it is pertinent, however that doesn't mean the service has failed in my opinion. Outside of gmail, there are countless alternatives suitable for all people that just want an address to those that bring their own domain. As long as alternatives exist, nothing is lost.

However, a larger omission is the fact that the new wave of federated services based on ActivityPub, Mastodon, Pixelfed[1], et all are missing from the article. I think that these disparate applications addressing different use cases, but which can talk to each other are the future of a federated web. Yes, there are larger entities that already carved a big chunk of the userbase, yes there are incompatibilities, but they're just starting and I'm optimistic.

[1] I'm talking from the perspective of someone that's building something in this space.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#179

Post by throwaway2556 »

lmm wrote: post #41

Counterthesis: decentralised applications are losing popularity because XMPP was so awful that it poisoned the view of decentralisation. Pre-XMPP everything was decentralised and federated. Post-XMPP decentralisation became synonymous with less-good clones of centralised systems, and both new systems and existing decentralised systems started moving towards centralisation. Decentralisation will come back again when t…

If anyone wanna try out XMPP, Conversations is a good client for android, available on fdroid. Dino is a good Linux client. IMO dismail and trashserver seem to be good public servers, if you don't wanna host yourself [1][2].

[1] https://dismail.de/

[2] https://trashserver.net/en/

You're gonna hear some saying it's all oh so secure. But be aware of tradeoffs [3].

[3] https://infosec-handbook.eu/blog/xmpp-aitm/

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#180

Post by [deleted] »

pdonis wrote: post #162
intarga wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, author here. I hope it does age poorly. I tried to make it clear that I’m a prolific user of decentralised applications, and that I really want them to succeed. I just pointed out my feelings on why they usually don’t, in the hope we can do something about it.

> I just pointed out my feelings on why they usually don’t I think this part of the article, instead of just being the last four paragraphs, should have been almost all of it. As it is, you make some very strong claims with no supporting argument whatsoever: "the solution has to be political" "The current system of profit motives, one might call it a market, was designed to optimise the process of extracting, refinin…

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