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Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#211

Post by streamofdigits »

Its a worthwhile read, if nothing else it highlights the enormous talent, energy and conviction that went into so many projects that adopt some sort of federated / distributed architecture. Ergo, the "solution" is not technical, it is primarily political, at least as a catalyst. The main reason (imho) none of those (evidently workable) ideas has ever evolved to reach mainstream is the US political system malfunction (which is fairly evident in general...) but more specifically visible in relation to updating and enforcing anti-trust laws. In simple terms in recent decades the political class did not see a monopoly they didn't like. The result is that you can summarize recent tech history in a single sentence "The rise and fall of the Microsoft monopoly in the hands of the successor Google monopoly".

Cutting "big tech" to size (big "tech" being a business sector misnomer that reveals the fake reality we all agree to swim in) will instantly propel decentralized protocols to mainstream: Smaller commercial operators will be forced to interoperate; Any usability issues or missing functionality will be developed in no-time.

The tentative link to the "physical" economy and externalities towards the end of the post is quite aposite and solutions to its own problems will be increasingly entangled with "solving" the digital economy. Just take the pandemic as an example: it is not hard to imagine digital infrastructure playing a key role in quickly identifying and limiting the spread of pandemics yet there was huge and justified mistrust that the monopolies will abuse their role...

Markets and virtual constructs such as corporates receive their legitimacy and license to operate from institutions serving the collective. When those institutions fail -> markets fail -> the collective suffers.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#212

Post by jwblackwell »

pnt12 wrote: post #207
samatman wrote: post #115

All 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…

"But I'm..." A specific user from a niche geek website, a rounding error, an anecdote. I'm glad for those fighting against these walled garden overlords, but let's keep in mind we're talking about a side with thousands of people VS a side with billions of people. Numbers matter, and the fall of these giants is still far away. If anything, the battle is starting from recent anti-competition and privacy concerns in the…

At first the internet was only used by weird geeks

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#213

Post by miguelmurca »

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…

... Does it? The author made it pretty clear throughout the article that (in their opinion; see the "Blockchain" section) the walled-gardening comes from having to trap in your users in order to make some money from your service. The conclusion that you need to change the (larger picture) motivations for the existence of these services in order not to fall into this behaviour seems logical to me. (And, of course, if you want to change social organisation/motivation, the solution has to be political.)

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#214

Post by jcelerier »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #187
zdw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There are zero standards for this terminology, aren't there?

There is one standard per distributed application research paper

https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=distributed+application

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#215

Post by swiley »

0xCMP wrote: post #80
casmclas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of…

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…

I'm not convinced Google really solved spam, they're just not afraid to turn the sensitivity on the filter way up even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam. Most smaller admins seem concerned about correctness and so they don't do this.

I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#216

Post by casmclas »

colordrops wrote: post #208
casmclas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of…

She'd be wrong about that too. Just look at how much better email is than instant messaging. It has succeeded infinitely more at being a decentralized application than IM.

Well that is an argument no-one is making. No one is comparing email and IM and asking which is succeeding better at being a decentralised application. You're right: email is certainly less centralised than Whatsapp. But it's a red herring. The comparison is between the original implementation of email as a decentralised system and the current experience of email, which is highly centralised.

In the olden days, any business could say in good faith "I want to offer email services" and they would have been treated pretty much the same as any other good faith provider of email service. But today, a business who wanted to start up an email service is insane; just check out the nearby thread of a person who replaced Mailchimp with a semi-self-rolled service. As a matter of fact, no matter what the RFCs say, people in the industry do not treat email as decentralised.

This is partially because people joined the network in bad faith, but it's also because a small number of large nodes are able to assume anyone who isn't known to them is acting in bad faith and therefore force people towards the larger nodes.

As I said before, email and the web continue to be usable in a decentralised fashion, but to do so involves wearing a hairshirt. This is the failure of decentralised applications. The author of the article has a view that is closer to "the market is only as free as its weaker members" rather than the view more fashionable hereabouts "the market is only as free as its stronger members", which leads to a different conclusion. It would probably lead to more insightful disagreements to discuss this underlying difference rather than arguing about what technologies email is less centralised than. (Edit to clairfy: These things in quotation marks are not quotes. The quotation marks are used to help delimit the propositions.)

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#217

Post by KptMarchewa »

ayyy wrote: post #116
m3kw9 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If BitTorrent is so great why isn’t it used more today for file transfers vs hosted storage? Also it is mostly used for piracy because authorities cannot shut down a decentralized system.

It is. Blizzard has been using it for years: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader This company is new and is using it as a CDN: https://www.peer5.com/ Bittorrent is everywhere, just like Linux, and you mostly don't notice it.

Blizzard was been using it for few years, and does not for 8 years now.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#218

Post by callahad »

HDMI_Cable wrote: post #123
samatman wrote: post #115

All 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…

> The one I'm really betting on is Matrix, though. They have reliable income from the French and German governments, and plenty of motive to make a really good platform. I fully expect them to be as slick and featureful as Slack and Discord within a couple of years, and start to eat those company's lunch. I don't think it even needs to be that. Most people (in the west) are tired of all of these apps, and their data…

> If Element had better branding (maybe focusing on the Matrix bridges)

The folks at https://www.beeper.com/ are pursuing exactly that angle, all based on Matrix.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#219

Post by taneq »

casmclas wrote: post #55
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…

> 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. I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of…

Decentralised doesn’t mean egalitarian, though.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#220

Post by Glavnokoman »

0xCMP wrote: post #80
casmclas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of…

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…

Google mail is used by so many because it has resources to make it free.
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