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Decentralize All the Things

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Re: Decentralize All the Things

#61

Post by Htsthbjig »

I agree on decentralization of things, but for this we need tools that make it easy to decentralize, tools that we don't have yet.

Installing a tool for creating your own "facebook network", or "search engine", or "maps engine" should be as easy as installing an app in Apple MacOs. Anybody should be able to install it.

Historically only very highly trained system admins could do it.

Probably tools like docker will be used in the backend for something like this, but we need easy to use front ends, standards, and so on.

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#62

Post by hyc_symas »

jacquesm wrote: post #51
hyc_symas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only. Asymmetric bandwidth really sucks for p2p. And most "broadband" connections in the US are asymmetric.

Yes, you're right, that's the other one but as long as home connections are consumption centric that will likely remain. It's been that way since time immemorial, 300/75 was my first modem, the only time that I had symmetrical up/down was in the ISDN period.

Your point about firewalls makes me wonder if their time is past. The Sony hack was clearly an inside job, and we've always known that the majority of data breaches over history have been inside jobs. It seems we need to focus on better local security, and once we've done that, the need for firewalls disappears. And then we can open internet connections freely again, like we used to before firewalls became so popular.

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#63

Post by hyc_symas »

cromwellian wrote: post #52

I've been hoping we return to dencentralization for awhile http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm... but it seems the economics, bandwidth, and technology currently doesn't favor it. Consider what it would take to do decentralized search with a reasonable latency. Everyone would have to have a copy of Google's index, or at atleast a reasonable chunk of it, or proximity to some mesh node with a r…

There is certainly an inherent efficiency in centralization, economy of scale in resource costs both physical and human.

But even the large players have to distribute their data centers - there's a geographical limit at which you must decentralize again anyway. So the key here is to decentralize at the proper scale - large enough nodes to be cost effective, widely enough distributed to prevent SPOF and provide good response times. I'm pretty sure this can be done at a level smaller than where the Google/Yahoo/Microsofts of the world operate.

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#65

Post by 7952 »

pjc50 wrote: post #50
7952 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OneNote is an example of a good decentralised system. You get a multiuser wiki that only needs a shared folder to save. It is installed alongside MS Office and can be setup without any involvement from IT staff. It is several orders of magnitude easier than installing MediaWiki and needs no big internet connection. It is a big lie to believe that multi-user applications always need infrastructure, they just n…

OneNote is fascinating; it's a great product Microsoft have hardly marketed. Possibly as it's the antithesis of Sharepoint, which is several orders of magnitude harder than installing MediaWiki and therefore people feel committed to using it.

SharePoint is also fascinating. It has an amazing set of features that make total sense from an engineering an features point of view. Yet in my experience it is slow, buggy, and most of the features are never used properly.

It has proper versioning and locking that should make team work much simpler. But the philosophy is never really explained and people are just told to interact with features and let the magic solve their problems.

Yet people have been doing versioning and locking for donkeys years without ever needing any help, you just make a new file with V2 at the end. We just need software to provide a little consistency and surface conflicts. SharePoint obscures this behind feature bloat and infrastructure.

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#66

Post by rezendi »

dj-wonk wrote: post #12

I wish the article would have hit on a key distinction: there is a difference between technically decentralized and economically decentralized. The first is about network topology. The second is about who owns and benefits economically.

OP here -- yeah, that's a very good and cogent point. Hope to explore it more in the future.

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#67

Post by dj-wonk »

walterbell wrote: post #34
dj-wonk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm helping out on a project that is a mix of decentralized and distributed. It is "a (nascent) specification for distributed, immutable, derived, addressable data. It defines a layer for addressing data, providing a foundation for downstream functions such as data caching, transport, discovery, and computation." https://github.com/tdxlabs/fondo I know there are related projects (mentioned and linked in the repo abov…

Would there be any room for cooperation with camlistore?

I'd be happy to learn more and meet people from (or using) the project. There do appear to be points of overlap.
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