This piece to me seems to suffer from not having a clear audience. A non-technical audience isn't adequately invited to care about the topic, and a technical audience isn't offered evidence for many of the broad assertions made.
Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
281–290 of 311 posts
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#282All 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…
This is really tricky because of course if I point to my non technical friends and family who use my Matrix instance, it's possible to say well that's just because they want to talk to the technical people on there, except that's the entire point of the comment you're replying to: the technical few act as the opinionated minority that can sway the majority once a switching cost is low enough. I think it's possible to believe both that this is a potential mechanism for change and that as you say, any victory is far away.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#283I think its a mistake to assume any broad set of users see decentralization as a feature. Decentralization and discovery are opposition forces. It is important to recognize that "discovery" is what people want. Businesses want to be found. Content producers want to be found. We all want to learn more about what each other wants so we can be better at providing that. Individual consumers might not want to be found, until you start talking about dating apps or other clout-driven activity like job hunting or social interaction. Then its all about discovery again.
My thinking was about as anti-platform or anti-monopoly as it can be since, well, forever. But learning how to build business over the last decade has really opened my eyes to the harder parts of being a human and the hurdles to bringing value to market. So, here I sit with the skills to build just about anything I can imagine, a fairly deep understanding of broad business topics, and a bankroll... I'm working for someone else because honestly, the LoE to build something is dwarfed by the LoE required to identify and understand customers, and bring anything to market WITH centralized platforms. Going "decentralized" would increase that cost dramatically.
People are out here paying a third of the cost-to-customer right into the pockets of app stores because the stores create a safe market for consumers. The decentralized version looks like millions of people downloading and installing random .exe files from the internet. Then self-centralizing on a few sites with cringy names like download.com. Nobody wants that. Humans copy-pasta like crazy and naturally centralize.
I'd expect any decentralized system that fails to provide some unified discovery experience will fail. And if that system is centralized then the whole thing may as well be centralized.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
My point is that it's better than the alternative. A "failed" decentralized protocol like SMTP is better than several "successful" silo'ed IM clients, payment providers, forum platforms, etc. Framing it as a failure without context leaves out the important detail that it's still more successful than centralized but balkanized solutions.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#285Earlier 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…
> 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 How can these two sentences be true at the same time?
I don't work at google nor have any details on this, but I would assume that just because they could detect it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a cost and blocking things which don't meet some minimum trust level from Google's perspective would cut a lot of the noise down from naive spamming.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly what OP was referring to: that's what you are actually interested in, but not everyone.
yes of course, the article is giving examples how systems with distributed ownership are failing because not everyone cares about that. so distributed ownership is what she is interested in, and hence that is the topic of our discussion.
That may be so, although the author's own words doesn't clearly state that ("To clarify what I mean by decentralised: applications whose main purpose is fulfilled as part of a network, where that network is not reliant on any preordained nodes." - nothing about ownership there. MasterMaster db replication meets that definition, but is petty clearly not the type of thing you are referring to. Regardless in context you're probably right abouy which definition the author is using).
Nonetheless, that doesn't make it any less of a problem that the definitions are severely overloaded. The issue is not that the article is unclear in its definitions (even though it is imo), the issue is that its hard to have discussions about the topic and compare to other articles, because people talk past each other. Words having agreed meanings is important so we can connect ideas to a broader context and not just talk about individual articles in isolation.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you miss my point. Whether or not its possible for one party to dominate the network is one of the potential properties of a "distributed" system that people cannot agree on if its required in the definition. For example, napster, TOR and IRC are arguably "distributed" systems where there is a central party that controls the network.
there are different definitions for being distributed. IRC is a distributed system much like a CDN is distributed, that is spread across the network. what we are actually interested in is distributed ownership. email is that, as is the web, but IRC is not
Given the history of efnet, i actually think irc fits really nicely into the author's premise.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#288The decentralized applications don't need to "win" (in market share) to be successful. They just need to be viable alternatives for a non-insignificant number of principled people willing to use them. This is enough to ensure that big players are kept in check. It's a basic application of Taleb's "Minority Rule" [0] I don't care that gmail has the majority of the market. I care that Google can not simply break compat…
> political intervention and regulation always works out in favor of the status quo.
A bold statement needs strong evidence. "Always" is already debunked with one counter-example. A look at the history of the labor movement or that of anti-trust legislation proves you wrong. Former pushed for worker-friendly legislation out of a grassroots and labor party-based movement, achieving laws that are often more demanding of larger companies. And latter may have seen a lack of enforcement since the Reagan era, but is chiefly centered on making big companies pay.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I'd also be interested in hearing what UX gripes your audience has, and am surprised to hear you praise Slack, which has lately become the just-good-enough-to-not-be-bad slow and bloated default.
I wouldn't dare say Slack has buttery-smooth performance. The problem with Element is all the little "what the f#ck?" bugs that add up.
An emblematic example is where the Android app sometimes glitches out and makes it seem a message you sent was sent by someone else. To be charitable I heard a fix is "on the way," but wow.
The markdown editor can also be glitchy. When I use italics or the triple backticks for code it won't always render in your client. It still feels like a hit and miss (albeit far more rare these days.)
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd also be interested in hearing what UX gripes your audience has, and am surprised to hear you praise Slack, which has lately become the just-good-enough-to-not-be-bad slow and bloated default.
I wouldn't dare say Slack has buttery-smooth performance. The problem with Element is all the little "what the f#ck?" bugs that add up. An emblematic example is where the Android app sometimes glitches out and makes it seem a message you sent was sent by someone else. To be charitable I heard a fix is "on the way," but wow. The markdown editor can also be glitchy. When I use italics or the triple backticks for code i…
> the Android app sometimes glitches out and makes it seem a message you sent was sent by someone else
Wow, ouch.
> When I use italics or the triple backticks for code it won't always render in your client
Infuriatingly, Slack very often does the same thing. It's super broken.