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The importance of decentralisation

ungleich.ch

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Re: The importance of decentralisation

#21

Post by telmich »

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

Love the challenge. Let me start by replying to your DMZ comment: with IPv6, you actually have to rethink and with it you can organise the Internet very different from today.

I agree with you that people don't want to maintain complex systems. But then again, running a git server or even cgit, is a matter of little minutes spent, especially if you use ready to deploy toolchains.

I also think you have a point in terms of equilibrium - people are in general more comfortable with something they know. And due to the long history of IPv4 shortage, people are used to having private IPv4 space only.

It is like animals in a zoo - we don't know anymore, how good the life used to be with public IPv4 addresses, we have grown up without them.

What I have seen from many discussions and visits in the last months is that IT startups are now reconsidering and embracing IPv6, because it gives freedom.

I'd also say the approach is not to directly replace facebook & co., but to think completely different. Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network.

Thinking different is the key for decentralisation.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#22

Post by Ghexor »

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

I like to study this force as well and I agree with your claim. A degree of centralization appears to be quite useful in the real world.

Recently I've been thinking about modelling an economic system after biological ones. It seems they face a very similar problem of resource allocation. Extreme centralization (think big tech) could be thought of as a form of cancer in this frame. Biology solves this through a limited lifespan of cells. So an economy modelled after it might include something like a lifespan for companies.

I'm interested in what you think on this or if anyone knows exsisting resources on this relationship.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#23

Post by peterwwillis »

telmich wrote: post #7
oakejp12 wrote: post #6

I may be somewhat confused, but how would a different IP address/system prevent centralized services? It seems to me that the same market problems, the strong vendor lock-ins explained in the post, will still persist in IPv6. There's no mention of how/why IPv6 solves those problems, just that they do...

It doesn't prevent them, but with IPv6 everyone can take back control. With IPv4, you are unable to get a decent amount of public addresses to run your service (if you are not having tons of money already).

> with IPv6 everyone can take back control

Any service provider can just decide not to route consumer-facing IPv6 addresses. It's not like we all had tons of our own free routable static IPv4 addresses two decades ago, you still had to get them allocated from a service provider and have them route to you, and be allowed to host services. They're "giving away" IPv6 routing and allocation right now, but there is absolutely nothing stopping them from ending that practice.

You only have the control they allow you to have.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#24

Post by hirundo »

This underlines the positive side of Tall Poppy Syndrome. Envy has a number of serious down sides, including making the sufferer miserable for, usually, very little return. But when people stop using an Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc., because they are successful, it creates a counter-force to centralization. Like hate, when well directed, envy can be good. Like hate, it can easily get out of control and cause great damage, up to and including genocides.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#25

Post by aloknnikhil »

telmich wrote: post #21
jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

Love the challenge. Let me start by replying to your DMZ comment: with IPv6, you actually have to rethink and with it you can organise the Internet very different from today. I agree with you that people don't want to maintain complex systems. But then again, running a git server or even cgit, is a matter of little minutes spent, especially if you use ready to deploy toolchains. I also think you have a point in terms…

You're missing the point. Even if running a git server is easy, not everyone will bother to maintain it and setup a regular backup process. Also, where do you back that data up to? Some central server or DHT/BitTorrent. Inherently, AWS is popular because companies would rather pay to have someone deal with the headache of managing hardware and infrastructure.

> Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network.

Because I'm not always online and you might not be when I'm.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#26

Post by nindwen »

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

While decentralized protocols don't entirely prevent centralization, they're still better than if the protocol was centralized. While Facebook and Google exist, we can still make websites. While most people use Gmail, we can still run our own mail servers.

Even if 90% of users use the centralized service, the protocol being open gives enormous value to the remaining 10%. And as long as the 10% keep the protocol open, the _possibility_ of decentralization can keep the centralized services honest.

We only need to keep the googles of the world from completely shutting down the open protocols. I mean, even that can get hard, but it's still entirely reasonable goall.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#27

Post by solatic »

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

> Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization.

Ironically enough, people do not live year-round in centralized hotels with cleaning services provided. They live in their own decentralized homes, and make an economic decision whether to take care of their cleaning needs by themselves, or to outsource and hire somebody to clean their domicile for them.

There seems to be an inherent assumption that running your own services necessitates taking care of maintenance yourself. I think this is a mistake - we just haven't been able to develop yet a model where we own decentralized installations and outsource the maintenance, even though in many other instances, this is the case - not just cleaning and houses, but endpoints and OS updates.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#28

Post by blamestross »

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

The centralization-decentralization cycle is about efficiency vs robustness trade-off at a system level.

When we have a decentralized system that feels safe, we centralize it to increase efficiency. Eventually we have a disaster that convinces us that decentralization was worth it and we re-create it. Then eventually we grow complacent and repeat the process.

When I design a decentralized system now, I just assume it can only live a decade or two before it gets killed and I need to do it again under new branding.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#29

Post by Darthy »

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

I don't think centralization automatically becomes the status quo.

The reason why we have the current centralization of amazon, facebook, github etc is because the web as we are currently using it has centralization built in: A browser always connect to a fixed server. But that is not god-given, we created it that way 25 years ago, and we could allow additional other ways. A browser could instead also be connecting to a generalized service for selling, communicating etc.

Another way how this could be changed: We could bypass centralization by ensuring that a webpage on ones device can aggregate many services, by emulating visiting other websites in the background, and we make sure that those sites will not be able to find out that are are not being called directly as the main address, but will only be giving out their data. For that, we would have to remove current Cross-domain requests restrictions.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#30

Post by sooheon »

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

That trend toward centralization and aggregation is mirrored in wealth, influence, and matter. Barring outside intervention, returns on capital will outpace returns on industry, businesses will monopolize, and water will flow downhill.

Because it is so natural, those who would oppose these forces are motivated to do unnatural things like blog, protest, legislate, regulate... Governments redistribute wealth, hold antitrust hearings, and people write blog posts like this one. I agree with you, unless we find a way to fundamentally alter incentives, effort spent toward decentralizing is effort spent swimming upstream. Of course even in streams that eventually end up in the sea, there's a lot of activity in eddies.

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