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 the best systems are decentralised.
Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#42All of the mentioned things work just fine. In life, nothing is perfect. For example, I can't use a CPU based on an open ISA as my daily driver. Does that mean that CPUs "don't work"? Of course not. The fact that something is used for illegal purposes means that it doesn't work? Does LSD "not work"? The fact that something is hard to set up or maintain mean that it doesn't work? Does Linux not work? Do airplanes not…
I agree with your sentiment. The style you chose to express it makes it hard to read. It seems unnecessarily defensive, sort of like someone poking me in the chest to make a point about something that I don’t feel emotional about.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#43All of the mentioned things work just fine. In life, nothing is perfect. For example, I can't use a CPU based on an open ISA as my daily driver. Does that mean that CPUs "don't work"? Of course not. The fact that something is used for illegal purposes means that it doesn't work? Does LSD "not work"? The fact that something is hard to set up or maintain mean that it doesn't work? Does Linux not work? Do airplanes not…
Each of those perspectives is in fact taken by many people. From the government's perspective, if something is used for illegal purposes, that's a severe defect and the thing isn't working. From Greenpeace's perspective, cars do not work.
None of that is relevant to the people who use drug marketplaces or cars, but those are different people.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#44I largely nodded along with the post, I think it raised a lot of valid issues about the state of non-profit software
Yet, I think one big reason why non-profit solutions are so unpopular is not primarily about marking, but about the terrible, truly terrible UX that most non-profit projects have.
As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers.
Element is a laggy Discord clone. Signal is years behind other messengers in terms of features and general UI quality, Thunderbird is stock in the early 2000s, same as VLC, and I don't know a lot of serious artists that are using GIMP.
So, even though this is surely not the only reason why open source projects are not widely used, I think it's a huge contributing factor.
There are shining example s though, like Blender, Godot or Mastodon, that are truly open source and have a great set of features paired with nice UX and I don't think they're doing too badly :)
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#45> What GitHub does though, is rather more sinister. They tweak the actual development workflow away from email with features like pull requests, and and they lock project data in with features like their issue system.
1) when my project gets PRs, how do I hear about this most of the time? Yep, email
2) Nothing is forcing anyone to use github as their canonical repo. For my project, our canonical repo is self-hosted, and we use hooks to mirror to github. This lets people familiar with github use their tools and workflow, but avoids us being particularly tied into the github way.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#46Regulation is presented as one possible solution, with a footnote expressing some uncertainty about that path. I just wanted to add that I think the economics plans laid out by Richard Wolff can do a lot to better align the motives of firms to the motives of the people. Wolff is prolific online so I will not try to argue his case, but I do believe that essentially “make a sizable portion of the economy comprised of worker managed cooperatives” actually would tend to solve some of the problems related to centralization in an open market. Wolff does not generally advocate for government based solutions except for possible legislation that would make it easier for cooperatives to thrive.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly that is both the strength and the weakness. The strength consists in the inability of any one party to dominate the network. The weakness is the noise and ineffectiveness of communication.
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.
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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#48Whats the biggest downside to having all the data? You are responsible for it. Google, Twitter and Facebook, store and link to data and are therefor responsible for all kinds of things, like keeping porn away from kids, securing data, dealing with privacy, verifying age, dealing with local laws, managing the needs of rights holders, moderating discussions, deciding if Donald trump should be banned or not and so on, a…
> A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.
I agree, and I'd love to see Our Decentralized Future happen -- though I worry that 'smart designer' might end up implying one of the following in practice:
(a) smart enough to stick to a design so limited, in terms of P2P communication, that it'll not be a threat to current Killer Apps.
(b) smart, to the point of omniscience, regarding what a judge may decide is the designer's problem.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#49I largely nodded along with the post, I think it raised a lot of valid issues about the state of non-profit software Yet, I think one big reason why non-profit solutions are so unpopular is not primarily about marking, but about the terrible, truly terrible UX that most non-profit projects have. As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical persp…
What's wrong with VLC or Thunderbird? Nothing, they got replaced by online services which provide storage/content and not just the UI (usually the UI feature set of online services is actually inferior).
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#50The 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 think that's the problem with 99% of articles about decentralized/federated/etc systems. Nobody can agree on what properties they want and everyone ends up talking past each other.
Someone needs to establish a terminology!