if your definition is magic nothing works
Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
181–190 of 311 posts
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#182All I can really say in response to this article is that I expect it to age poorly. 2021 is just a bad time to make confident pronouncements about decentralization. The vast majority of the population is living in Facebook/WhatsApp/Discord/Visa&Mastercard land, sure. But I'm a heavy Matrix user, it works great. I torrent all the time: it works great. I'm also on urbit, and it works great. I don't use Mastodon persona…
I hope you're right about Matrix. I use it for my developer conferences [0] but their main chat client [1] is still derided by my audience. Subpar UX is the barrier to overcome. Element has come far, but Slack and Discord have more solid product direction. [0] https://www.handmade-seattle.com [1] https://element.io
Are there any specific UX pain points that frequently get raised?
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#183"Bitcoin launched with the stated goal of providing an alternative financial system,2 and other blockchain projects followed with all manner of lavish promises. Bitcoin failed at the stated goal (unless you count the dark net markets). It has instead defaulted to pyramid scheme, with the added externality of wasting a stupefying amount of energy."
This is not true.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#184"Bitcoin launched with the stated goal of providing an alternative financial system,2 and other blockchain projects followed with all manner of lavish promises. Bitcoin failed at the stated goal (unless you count the dark net markets). It has instead defaulted to pyramid scheme, with the added externality of wasting a stupefying amount of energy." This is not true.
Please elaborate.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#185Internet was made for people but without google it would be unusable for most. People don't care about technology or freedom they want free (of charge) email and dumb-proof websites.
Also getting politics into this is the exact opposite of decentralization.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#186I'm a bit confused about the conclusion. Seems to me the cited reason have mostly in common the fact that a centralized system is easier and faster to evolve, and that private companies have more focus on pleasing the widest audience ("use this product because it is made by a for-profit organisation" isn't a thing).
It is indeed political, but i see it more as a need for distributed systems governing bodies to improve rather than for regulation of centralized ones.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#187Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#188Earlier 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. 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 nev…
> 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.
It's been 5+ years since I've last used SpamAssassin, but at that time it didn't hold a candle to Gmail's spam filtering.
Also you're incredibly alienated if you think a "normal person" could manage their own mailserver. 95%+ of western people couldn't use a CLI.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#189The 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…
Protocols like e-mail, Mastodon and Matrix where the server-to-server protocol is decentralized/peer-to-peer but clients interact with the network through designated servers are generally considered "federated" (which can be either considered as distinct from or a subset of "decentralized") So the author seems to take "decentralized" here to mean "fully decentralized and peer-to-peer", which is indeed an unconvention…
> Protocols like e-mail, Mastodon and Matrix
I must correct you here on "Protocols like Mastodon". The protocol that underlies the Fediverse is the W3C ActivityPub Recommendation [0] and making that distinction is really important. Not doing so would encourage centralization in the same ways as discussed elsewhere in this thread for Email vs. Gmail.
Mastodon is just a fediverse app that was an early adopter of ActivityPub, and managed to become quite popular. Part of this due to a better productization, and the jumpstart this gave them offering the best features first. To many newcomers Fediverse === Mastodon, but - while understandable - this is massively shortselling the interop capabilities of the protocol.
What has already happened by Mastodon dominance is that they are driving the technological direction, but not necessarily in the best possible way and to the overall benefit of the Fediverse. They have a custom client API for instance that is becoming a de-facto standard, adopted by others out of convenience.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Name an ISP that will allow non-filtered TCP port 25 traffic for a non-business account to go through.