Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

ingrids.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 311 posts

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#291

Post by abnercoimbre »

feanaro wrote: post #182
abnercoimbre wrote: post #119

Earlier 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

Are there any specific UX pain points that frequently get raised?

See my reply to the comment above. Sometimes I feel these UX issues or bugs linger for too long, even if they're acknowledged. Could be due to the complexity of open-source + decentralization but still :(

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#292

Post by SergeAx »

smichel17 wrote: post #221
0xCMP wrote: post #80

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. 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…

Anecdote: although I have spamassassin set up to add a header to my email, my filter for moving likely spam into the appropriate folder is currently commented out, because I get so little spam. I get a very small amount at my public GitHub address, and a little more at one address that is in the source code of a FLO (free/libre/open) app I maintain, but it totals maybe one or two emails a month. Public organizational…

I just counted emails in my spam folder, and it is between 6 and 10 per day. Email I actually subscribed to or from other legit sources is in the range of 12-20, almost exactly twice of spam. I am not counting days when I do a contradictory post on local tech resource and getting hundreds of reply notifications.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#293

Post by em-bee »

bawolff wrote: post #287
em-bee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

well not quite. since nicks and channels are replicated across all servers it should be clear that any irc op can control all nicks and channels. hence control is centralized and its merely distributed-replicated on a technical level even if governance is so trusting as to allow anyone to join.

distributed ownership, aka federation does not require trust between operators as each operator is trusted only to manage their own servers without being able to control entities that originate from other servers

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#294

Post by cvwright »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #291
feanaro wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any specific UX pain points that frequently get raised?

See my reply to the comment above. Sometimes I feel these UX issues or bugs linger for too long, even if they're acknowledged. Could be due to the complexity of open-source + decentralization but still :(

Matrix is one team trying to build three apps. Android, iOS, and web are all distinct code bases. Plus all the server side stuff.

They’ve taken on a huge amount of work.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#295

Post by atatatat »

oblio wrote: post #252
atatatat wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a technology influencer, according to the research of those large companies. We are the ones who give the network effect to those services.

And those same companies have entire departments, with huge budgets, to promote their stuff, draw people into them, discourage people from using those other services, buy out influencers, etc It's not a fair fight and it will never be. I wouldn't say it's completely lost, but it's not far.

Signal was an impossible uphill battle on inception.

Nothing in tech is impossible — it's far too new.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#296

Post by pdonis »

miguelmurca wrote: post #213
pdonis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Does it?

Yes, because...

> in their opinion

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#297

Post by smichel17 »

SergeAx wrote: post #292
smichel17 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: although I have spamassassin set up to add a header to my email, my filter for moving likely spam into the appropriate folder is currently commented out, because I get so little spam. I get a very small amount at my public GitHub address, and a little more at one address that is in the source code of a FLO (free/libre/open) app I maintain, but it totals maybe one or two emails a month. Public organizational…

I just counted emails in my spam folder, and it is between 6 and 10 per day. Email I actually subscribed to or from other legit sources is in the range of 12-20, almost exactly twice of spam. I am not counting days when I do a contradictory post on local tech resource and getting hundreds of reply notifications.

Interesting. I assume you have a single email address, so you can't tell the source? (I have a catch-all at my domain ⇒ I use a different email for each site, which is how I know which addresses generate spam). Is your address posted publicly in plain-text somewhere?

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#298

Post by lmm »

Jiejeing wrote: post #202
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…

This is… an interesting take. You mean that everything before the 1999 XMPP PoC was decentralized, and XMPP killed it? (despite the actual situation at the time being split between closed and centralized networks, like MSN, ICQ, etc). And XMPP is to blame for the failure of all the other decentralized systems (that have nothing in common) that came between then and now? Additionally, considering several hundred milli…

> This is… an interesting take. You mean that everything before the 1999 XMPP PoC was decentralized, and XMPP killed it? (despite the actual situation at the time being split between closed and centralized networks, like MSN, ICQ, etc). And XMPP is to blame for the failure of all the other decentralized systems (that have nothing in common) that came between then and now?

I mean that instant messaging was the first time (on the internet, at least) that centralized networks beat decentralised networks (whereas centralised competitors to email, the web, etc. had lost), and the legacy of that is why many subsequent network systems (that indeed have very little in common) have been built as centralised rather than decentralised. And I've gradually reached the conclusion that the reason the centralised networks won that one was not because they were uniquely good, but that XMPP was uniquely bad.

> Additionally, considering several hundred million people use XMPP on a daily basis (and even more use something that started out based on XMPP, e.g. whatsapp), saying that XMPP is so terrible that it killed everything is so weird that it would need some facts to back it up.

Actually I see the fact that modified forks of XMPP have been so much more successful than mainline XMPP as a demonstration that XMPP's design makes a lot of unforced errors.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#299

Post by abnercoimbre »

cvwright wrote: post #294
abnercoimbre wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my reply to the comment above. Sometimes I feel these UX issues or bugs linger for too long, even if they're acknowledged. Could be due to the complexity of open-source + decentralization but still :(

Matrix is one team trying to build three apps. Android, iOS, and web are all distinct code bases. Plus all the server side stuff. They’ve taken on a huge amount of work.

Not "giving them up" anytime soon. I'll continue to use Matrix at the conference.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#300

Post by rglullis »

Quanttek wrote: post #288
rglullis wrote: post #193

The 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 o…

Do you mean the same "labor-friendly" laws that pushed all manufacturing and labor intensive industry out of rich countries and into China, or do you mean the laws that made it impossible for small-medium business to compete with the big crony capitalists?

Never mind, it doesn't matter because it is completely orthogonal to my point. My point is that regulation works by applying top-down, global uniform of rules. It mandates centralized executive power, which is the polar opposite of bottom-up/localist/fractal/decentralized development of new tech and its applications.

"Making big companies pay" does not contradict "favoring the status quo". All that big banks want now is to be able to regulate crypto, so that they can keep away any threat of a disruptive business coming out of it. Same applies to Big Media and it is insistence of controlling information under the pretense of "battling fake news". Big Telco pushed for a long time to regulate OTT services, and this is until today it is so difficult to decouple voice from data plans. Facebook/ Twitter welcome regulation, because it will make basically impossible for small fediverse providers to grow and compete with them.

Regulation favors the status quo, how much more evidence do you need?

Post reply on HN