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We need decentralized communication

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Re: We need decentralized communication

#41

Post by bavell »

no_identd wrote: post #39
OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E-mailadres is also decentralized, but so what? Most people use the same email providers so it's somewhat meaningless for SMTP itself to be decentralized. Google can still read your emails. I actually think email is almost the ideal implementation of a decentralized network. You're always going to have giants in any communication network- that's simple the reality. Email allows people to use these giants or, and cr…

>You're always going to have giants in any communication network I suppose you make that claim based on the assumption that any electronic long range communication system at most reduces to a network? If so, your assumption—while applicable to our current global communications network—doesn't cover the communication systems which could (& hopefully would) already exist if the ARPAnet originators hadn't messed this up…

> if the ARPAnet originators hadn't messed this up by dropping the Internet layer and renaming the Network Layer to the 'Inter'net layer.

Can you send elaborate? Genuinely curious.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#42

Post by tgragnato »

bavell wrote: post #41
no_identd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're always going to have giants in any communication network I suppose you make that claim based on the assumption that any electronic long range communication system at most reduces to a network? If so, your assumption—while applicable to our current global communications network—doesn't cover the communication systems which could (& hopefully would) already exist if the ARPAnet originators hadn't messed this up…

> if the ARPAnet originators hadn't messed this up by dropping the Internet layer and renaming the Network Layer to the 'Inter'net layer. Can you send elaborate? Genuinely curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Back in the day the network layer was not standardised nor interoperable. The "International Network Working Group" provided a communication protocol (TCP/IP) capable of hiding the differences of the different networks.

> the job of the TCP is merely to take a stream of messages produced by one HOST and reproduce the stream at a foreign receiving HOST without change. [Cerf]

That network of networks demonstrated the feasibility of the concept of interconnection. The resulting net eventually became the global inter-network... INTERNET

Re: We need decentralized communication

#43

Post by reilly3000 »

My beef with Riot (at least as of 18 months ago) was how cumbersome it was to set up encrypted channels, especially on multiple devices. I'm not at a place where I can do much about that, but happy to support somebody who can (if its still an issue).

Re: We need decentralized communication

#44

Post by piotrkubisa »

> We need decentralized communication

> Although Riot has made significant progress in the past few months, there is still a long way to go before it becomes a suitable drop-in replacement for platforms such as WhatsApp or Discord.

The problem with adoption client based on Matrix protocol is clearly lack of the quality of clients and being so annoying for users. I think it also stands true for other protocols like IRC or XMPP. In my humble opinion, clients for all 3 are far behind Telegram or WhatsApp or even BBM.

Looking on commits in repos of various Riot clients, I am not sure if there is significant progress (yes, it's a bit unfair to said that, but comparing to let's say webpack repository, number of random contributions is quite low). For Android there are two versions - Riot and RiotX. RiotX is in early stage development (I'd say it's unusable), while the Riot just gets minor changes. iOS client is OK. Web and desktop client (based on electron) is not as simple as Slack to get start and running. I keep fingers crossed for Riot developers and spontaneous contributors to improve those clients - without good, simple to use clients there isn't any chance for Matrix to be adopted widely as WhatsApp or Telegram are.

Centralization is not really important factor for most of people during selection of communicator. IM is a tool and if it does not do its job properly, people will look for better alternatives. Just, please take a look how many sysadmins/devops switched to Slack from IRC. Please stop writing yet another article how centralization is bad - just help Vector.im, TheLounge.chat or other group to bring such IM client where most of people will be comfortable to use it.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#46

Post by CM30 »

piotrkubisa wrote: post #44

> We need decentralized communication > Although Riot has made significant progress in the past few months, there is still a long way to go before it becomes a suitable drop-in replacement for platforms such as WhatsApp or Discord. The problem with adoption client based on Matrix protocol is clearly lack of the quality of clients and being so annoying for users. I think it also stands true for other protocols like IR…

In other words, the project needs UI and UX designers, and more of a focus on a polished user experience.

Which seems to be an issue a lot of open source, decentralised projects have to be honest. They get a lot of programmers involved, but seem to struggle to get the aesthetics/design side up to par.

What would it take to get the kinds of designers found at the likes of Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, etc working on open source projects lke Matrix?

Re: We need decentralized communication

#47

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

no_identd wrote: post #39
OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E-mailadres is also decentralized, but so what? Most people use the same email providers so it's somewhat meaningless for SMTP itself to be decentralized. Google can still read your emails. I actually think email is almost the ideal implementation of a decentralized network. You're always going to have giants in any communication network- that's simple the reality. Email allows people to use these giants or, and cr…

>You're always going to have giants in any communication network I suppose you make that claim based on the assumption that any electronic long range communication system at most reduces to a network? If so, your assumption—while applicable to our current global communications network—doesn't cover the communication systems which could (& hopefully would) already exist if the ARPAnet originators hadn't messed this up…

It was more based on the idea of the network effect, because any service in communication systems may benefit from additonal users. This effect is uncoupled from the actual technical implementation, though that is also an important factor of course.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#49

Post by [deleted] »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #25
brenden2 wrote: post #13

A big thing that annoys me about buzzwords like "decentralized" is that they're not binary. Another one that's largely lost meaning is "blockchain". Decentralized is relative and depends entirely on the context. They do tend to represent ideas like anti-censorship, individualism, and (sometimes) privacy. I think it makes more sense to discuss these topics in terms of the actual implication of what you're decentralizi…

> E-mailadres is also decentralized, but so what? Most people use the same email providers so it's somewhat meaningless for SMTP itself to be decentralized. Google can still read your emails. I actually think email is almost the ideal implementation of a decentralized network. You're always going to have giants in any communication network- that's simple the reality. Email allows people to use these giants or, and cr…

[deleted]

Re: We need decentralized communication

#50

Post by CM30 »

amelius wrote: post #36
drngdds wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A technically-inclined person can beat them pretty easily (at least on the privacy/ethics front) by spending $5 on a Digital Ocean droplet and spinning up Nginx.

But then you don't have medium's discoverability.

At this point in time, does Medium offer much discoverability? I know it used to, but at the moment, it seems like anything that isn't being charged for gets buried. As does much of anything outside of a publication, or not created by a social media influencer.

(and the percentage of people who even check the latest story for a tag has fallen even further since the last redesign).

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