
Centralized Wins. Decentralized Loses - ghosthamlet
http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/8/22/what-do-you-believe-now-that-you-didnt-five-years-ago-centra.html
======
teleclimber
The author claims winners and losers but doesn't talk about the criteria for
winning and losing. Decentralized networks aren't after the same things as
centralized ones. They're not after engagement metrics, ARPU, or stock
valuation.

If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the
decentralized networks are far behind. But these things can change quickly
after changing slowly.

If decentralized networks cause big centralized ones to change their behavior
in meaningful ways, for fear of losing users to the decentralized ones, then I
would argue that's a win for decentralized networks. Small win, but still a
win.

~~~
lixtra
> If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the
> decentralized networks are far behind.

7B humans are organized in decentralized social networks (linked by small
world phenomenon). 99% active daily.

~~~
coralreef
Actually, they're on Facebook.

~~~
cbsmith
At best, 2B of them are.

~~~
A2017U1
There's only 3 billion internet users.

~~~
ksec
>There's only 3 billion internet users.

I am actually assuming you meant "Social Media Users" and not Internet users.
There are now more than 4B internet users.

~~~
karmakaze
I was wondering when this was going to happen. A repeat of when people thought
www = Internet.

------
Mc91
Watching the Internet develop since the 1980s, this leaves a lot of stuff out.

Yes, decentralized protocols like NNTP are not around like they used to be.
The reason for this is because Usenet was effectively crushed by the US
government. Many net luminaries, scientists, mathematicians, journalists,
artists etc. were users of Usenet. In the 1990s and on, the Baby Bell
monopolies used their monopoly powers to crush ISP competition. Then in 2008
Andrew Cuomo strongarmed the remaining monopoly telcos in New York to shut
down Usenet saying "This literally threatens our children, and there can be no
higher priority than keeping our children safe".

Obviously you can't say you want to crush decentralization in order to take
power away from the individual and place it in the hands of corporate
monopolies and the government, so you have to hear from the RIAA/MPAA about
how artists are being ripped off (although many artists say the RIAA and MPAA
are the ripoffs), or about terrorism, or the "think of the children" stuff
from this case.

> "it's controlable, it's governable, ..., it's walled gardenable,..., it's
> brandable, it's ownable, ..., it's auditable, it's copyright checkable, ...,
> it's safe for China searchable,..., it's monitorable"

Well this is correct. Now we can be more controlled, more governed, more
owned, more copyright checked, more monitored - these are all the benefits for
them as they remove our decentralized communications.

As the tendency toward recentralization seems to be in the US, a broader
metric is the ratio of US GDP to world GDP, i.e. centralization of the world
economy. This ratio has been falling since World War II - each year the US
economy becomes less and less significant. So while network control is being
centralized in the US, economic control in the world is becoming
decentralized.

~~~
krrrh
The point about Cuomo is definitely worth remembering, but USENET suffered its
own decline. The vast majority of folks who got online from the mid-nineties
on never learned how to use it or engaged with it in any fashion. Once the
center of gravity shifted to web-based forums, and then social media, the
older users mostly abandoned it.

The lack of comprehensive solutions for spam in the mid-90s should also not be
discounted. Spam is an easier problem for centralized systems to fix.

~~~
ghthor
I'd argue that its now even easier to combat spam using decentralization
technologies. If you gateway all actions prone to spam with a signed
transaction to a smart contract platform, where that execution costs the
spammer real value for each action the spammer no longer has a unequal
advantage. This means as an app developer I can mostly ignore combatting spam,
that's now an infrastructure problem that the transaction miners need to deal
with and handle. It's an empowering separation of concerns! Web 3.0 really
shaping up to be a revolutionary development in humanities technology progress
and modeling of the world around us.

------
jondubois
It will take a lot more time, but I think that decentralization will win in
the end.

Society could not operate without social contracts and those social contracts
are founded on certain universally agreed upon principles of fairness. As the
fairness of our economic system comes into question, more people feel
justified in exploiting loopholes within social contracts; this causes social
contracts to lose their integrity in the minds of people; which further
exacerbates the problem/behavior. Eventually, there comes a point when most
people are cheating the system; at that point, the system can no longer
function and it collapses.

Centralization creates an unfair economic environment because it limits the
spread of economic opportunities. Most people already see centralization as a
problem; as a source of injustice and inequality.

Just as the process of acquiring private property (as a result of wealth
accumulation) becomes increasingly unfair, social contracts founded on
principles of ownership of private property are themselves becoming weaker.

~~~
dnautics
there are situations where decentralization must win. You cannot, for example,
have a centralized network between the Earth and Mars.

~~~
ghthor
I'd argue economics is a system that requires decentralization as well. Now
with cryotocurrencies the burden required to get a seat at the table went from
basically an impossible game of politics and expression of violence/dominance
to a purely technical one. If I want to become a member of bitcoin I just need
to start computing and now I'm a member with voting power.

At an individual level this doesn't mean much, but at the geopolitical level
this is a huge improvement. The future I see before us is our governments
dropping the administrative burden of managing, minting, and distributing
there own currencies and becoming a contributing member to the crypto
computing platforms. If I was an up coming developing nation I'd be pouring
money in into computer engineering to become a member of these global currency
movments.

------
austincheney
The article is extremely light on substance. This issue can be more readily
addressed with a simple list:

Centralization pros:

    
    
      * security
      * ease of management
      * lower overhead in task delegation
      * maintenance simplicity
      * versioning
      * no distribution
    

Centralization cons:

    
    
      * fixed resources
      * fixed configuration
      * fixed environment
    

Looking at these lists centralization at first appears immediately superior.
These lists is an illusion in that it accounts for concerns in the present,
but it does not account for growth or future concerns. Decentralized systems
can scale in ways centralized systems cannot.

The fixed nature of a centralized system is also a huge limitation. Projects
like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered
distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed
super computer. While the computation power of super computers grows rapidly
over time so too does the computation power of your average home computer.

There is also an economic qualifier for distribution too. Computational
resources cost money in both hardware and electricity. When computational
tasks are distributed so too are the expenses of computation.

There is also a security/availability benefit to distributed systems.
Centralized systems are a single point of failure. Distributed systems, at
least in the public space, are diverse in their hardware and software which
allows the system immunization from many forms of attacks. A centralized
system can be isolated from the world by a DDOS attack, but it is
substantially hard to attack a distributed system in this way.

~~~
DenisM
Bigger problem with centralized services is stifling monoculture. There will
never be 10 different frontends to Facebook the way there can be 10 different
email clients. Or 10 different newsfeed sorting algorithms.

It’s the same problem that Amazon has - one size does not fit all in UX, and
one decision maker, even if very smart and well-meaning, will sooner or later
get himself into a corner and be stuck there.

~~~
kiriakasis
But one could say the same for a monoculture of protocols in decentralized
systems, the email protocol has been stable for a long time and has some
serious issues due to its decentralized nature.

For emails it is surely worth, but for many other application it might be
different.

~~~
ghthor
If you attach a signed monetary transaction cost using a decentralized smart
contract transaction system to sending email to a federated host I hypothesize
that spam would start dwindling. Email, IMO, largely grew into a centralized
system due to the difficulties in combating spam. From the receiving end where
filtering and blacklisting is a major system administration task. Self hosting
also requires high quality SRE skills to combat servers from being compromised
and used to flood the federated network with spam.

Make the act of sending a message cost the send or money and I think spam goes
away and self hosting becomes much simpler.

~~~
eropple
_> Make the act of sending a message cost the send or money and I think spam
goes away and self hosting becomes much simpler._

...and the service itself becomes _less useful to everybody who doesn 't want
to self-host_.

If you choose to off-road, you can't really complain about it being bumpy.

------
mark_l_watson
I wish it weren’t true but for right now I agree with the author, including
what it might take to tip the balance: “1. Complete deterioration of trust
such that avoiding the centralization of power becomes a necessity. 4. The
decentralization community manages to create clearly superior applications as
convenient and reliable as centralized providers.“

I was eager to use GNU Social, and after some use for a year, my host shut
down. I just opened another Mastadon account but haven’t started using it yet.
Also, the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting
people I follow. Social media is best when used as an advertising and
directory service for content we put on our own blogs and web sites, but even
that seems to be less common.

I really enjoyed the Decentralized Web Conference June 2016, but it also made
me slightly sad that fighting back against centralized web, political,
corporate, etc. centralization is an uphill fight.

Sometime network power laws suck.

~~~
liotier
> the value of centralized services like Twitter is the really interesting
> people I follow

Same as that shitty club with overpriced beers... We go where the interesting
people are and the bad ones kept under control.

~~~
egypturnash
So anywhere but Twitter then.

------
jerguismi
"That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet
was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet
(<1973), FINGER (1971/1977), TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS
(1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999),
and XMPP(1999)."

Yeah, no one uses TCP/IP, DNS or SMTP nowadays. Good thing that we have gotted
rid of those antiquated protocols and instead can use facebook and whatsapp!
</sarcasm>

~~~
coldtea
Why the sarcasm? It's true that (almost) no one uses them. Or, rather, no one
much cares about them, and when they do use them, it's proxied and controlled
by big corporate players.

SMTP is email -- and people (outside of business email) all the more commonly
use social networks for their communication. And even when they use email, a
huge percentage of it is through Gmail. Heck, intra-gmail user emails don't
even need (and maybe already don't) use SMTP/POP/IMAP at all, and that's a
heck of a big percentage of today's email use.

DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail,
Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them
through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect
through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user
experience).

Ditto for TCP/IP.

The fact that these protocols lark behind what we do at the higher level is
irrelevant, when the abstractions we've built totally hide them, in ways that
they didn't in the 80s and 90s.

Here's some food for thought:

[https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-
id...](https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-
using-the-internet/)

~~~
bogomipz
>"DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube,
Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use
them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect
through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user
experience)."

Except that those proprietary protocols would still need to go over the
internet where every router uses IP. So no they could not drop TCP/IP
tomorrow. And most(all?) of those 5-10 services you mention make extensive use
of IP Anycasting of DNS servers which has allowed them to scale to what they
are so DNS is very much relevant to the success of those services.

~~~
coldtea
> _Except that those proprietary protocols would still need to go over the
> internet where every router uses IP._

Special pipes and contracts could take care of that too.

But in any case, it alone is small comfort when it comes to decentralization,
since TPC/IP still allows total consolidation of control of anything that
really matters to 5-10 companies (plus the telcos).

~~~
bogomipz
Please explain what these "special pipes" are connected to? Oh right they
would have to to connect to "special routers" that didn't run IP at all.
Special routers that these companies would have design and produce themselves.
And convince carriers to put in their networks.

Do you think these telcos, who have an almost adversarial towards these "over
the top" services are going to build out a parallel network and commit cap ex
to accommodate these companies new proprietary non-IP protocol networking
devices?

"Special contracts"? What does that even mean?

The dustbin of history is filled with proprietary network protocols - DECnet,
IBM's SNA, Xeros XNS, Banyan Vines, Novell Netware Apple Talk. There's a good
reason the world converged on TCP/IP.

Seriously your assertion is completely absurd.

~~~
bewo001
There are examples for this, eg carrier IPTV.

3GPP IMS had the grand vision of telco-controlled Internet Multimedia System
(IMS), an Internet modeled after the phone network. It runs over separate
lines or at least separate layer 2 sessions. An application would use a
signaling protocol (SIP etc) to request access to "multimedia" services like
gaming, the telco would reserve bandwidth and guarantee that the service could
be accessed with assured quality (and billed, of course).

While IMS uses internet tech, it has a completely different philosophy.

I'm not aware of any IMS network that went beyond doing telephony, though.

~~~
bogomipz
Are you listing these as failures then? IPTV would be little more than a niche
presence globally no?

~~~
bewo001
Those systems are not complete failures, but the underlying philosophy has
certainly failed. People don't prefer the ISP's QoS-guaranteed IPTV product
over Netflix or Youtube, which was the IPTV systems vendors' promise.

------
noobermin
Stop saying people don't care. (you can imagine me putting clap emojis between
those like a cringy twitter poster). A majority of people supported net
neutrality but the powers that be voted against it. The reality is of course
people care if they know or have time to learn about systems, they just have
no agency or power to effect change.

~~~
Negitivefrags
People cared about “Net Neutrality” because the name has a “free speech” ring
to it, even though that isn’t really anything to do with that. How could
anyone against the internet being neutral?

I think “decentralised” isn’t going to drum up any interest unless you can
couch it in the terms of a movement that people already understand and can be
certain that it’s something the “good guys” would definitely want.

------
rossdavidh
Centralized vs. decentralized is a pendulum that has been swinging since time
immemorial. Heck one could argue that cooperateive single-celled vs.
multicellular organisms boils down to a similar principle. Given that this
pendulum has been swinging back and forth since long before humans, and
certainly throughout human history, I believe it is safe to say that neither
is going to "win in the end". They each must obviously contain the seeds of
their own downfall. Which is interesting and worthy of study, but I don't see
this article particularly advancing the understanding of that.

------
mezzode
Honestly, I think that decentralized networks are able to leverage advantages
of centralization, like trust, while remaining decentralized enough to still
have the advantages from that front too.

GitHub and git are actually a good example of this, since you can use GitHub
and know the platform is reliable, trustworthy, etc. but you can also use
other hosts too. This degree of decentralization is at least better than fully
centralized services like Twitter where you have zero interoperability at all.
You can also see this in Mastodon too; the vast majority of users are on a
handful of instances like mastodon.social anyway.

------
gumby
What's often overlooked is that this same back-and-forth history predates
computing. The greatest strengths of centralization typically turn out to be
its weaknesses.

The strength of well-designed decentralized systems is resiliency. But it's
like multithreaded code; it's hard to write. Centralized systems trade off
brittleness and kludges for a certain amount of predictability and the ability
to actually hire programmers. As a result yes, you can run on multiple AWS
sites, but you have to know too much to make that convenient.

And other "benefits" (as the author points out those are two-edged)
("controlable, walled gardenable,defensible, brandable auditable, copyright
checkable, GDPRable...") are also by design chokepoints. Its those chokepoints
that make it brittle and that is where the weaknesses lie.

Pre-computing: in the 1950s and 1960s there was a public debate as to whether
the US government should be descentralized as a way of withstanding nuclear
attack. Though we got the highway system, instead the US became more
centralized, not less. And as a result it has contributed to more alienation
of the populace from their representatives. I long thought California should
spread its government around more for more public buy in and support (and for
that matter knowledgable opposition). But of course everybody who cares about
government wants to be "close to the seat of power", which we see particularly
in the federal government.

~~~
briancleland
It's a very old phenomenon indeed. Plato's Republic can be read as a
meditation on the centralisation of power, the pros and cons of centralisation
vs decentralisation, and how and why the balance shifts over time.

------
nordsieck
I think there are 2 issues at play here.

The first one, the article touched on obliquely:

> Back in those days of high adventure hosts were far more than mere pets,
> they were golden temples where crusaders came to worship speaking prayers of
> code. > > Today, servers aren't even cattle, servers are insects connected
> over fast networks. Centralization is not only possible now, it's
> economical, it's practical, ...

"Back in those days" users were administrators of one sort or another because
that was the barrier to entry. But administrating systems sucks, even if it's
just a PC. The rise of server-less is just another testament to this: being
able to outsource the boring, tricky bits to experts is great as long as the
principle-agent problem doesn't rear its head too often.

The second issue is that distributed (I suppose some people might call them
federated) identity systems don't work very well. Look at the vast gulf
between the spam problem on Facebook and the spam problem with email.

If you've signed up with a centralized identity system, it's pretty convenient
to use a bunch of services synced up with that identity: all of the social
media stuff is probably the tip of the iceberg.

~~~
api
This is a huge barrier to today's decentralized systems.

I wanted to check out Mastodon and looked into setting up a node. It's a
nightmare of rube goldberg machine dependency hell. It's not that I can't, but
that I don't have time to mess with it.

If decentralized system designers want these things to take off they must get
better at writing clean code with a good UX. Start with a good UX for admins:
single install, dependent on not much more than maybe a database or language
runtime, easy upgrades, and good docs about how to get started. Then as the
product matures work up to UX for end users. You will never get to the latter
if you don't plan ahead a little and avoid design and runtime choices that
drag in heaps of complexity or limit portability.

Decentralized protocols are maturing, but UX is still awful. I think UX is
half the problem.

The other half the problem is defending against attacks. In today's world
where computer networks and even simple services on them like discussion
platforms can be targets for professional criminals and even national
intelligence agencies, anything that gets popular will get seriously attacked.
Centralized systems are far more straightforward to defend: block IPs, kick
off users, update software in one place, etc.

People like to hold up cryptocurrency as one system that has withstood
constant attack, but that is only true if you limit scope to the protocol. As
a holistic system cryptocurrency has been and continues to be successfully
attacked with social engineering. Scammers are siphoning billions out of the
cryptocurrency economy. On centralized economic systems like banks and
exchanges you can ban, freeze funds, delist, and regulate.

~~~
teleclimber
> I wanted to check out Mastodon and looked into setting up a node. It's a
> nightmare of rube goldberg machine dependency hell. It's not that I can't,
> but that I don't have time to mess with it.

I've come to the conclusion lately that the thing holding decentralization
back the most is that sunning any kind of server-side code is challenging to
set up and a regular pain in the neck to maintain.

This prevents even tech-savvy people from setting up their own nodes of
whatever cool tech happens to come out (not just social networks, but RSS
readers, bookmarking apps, you name it: there is an OSS thing out there that
fits your needs but is a PIA to install and run.)

And in turn this limits the number of nodes that will ever run on a
decentralized service, and nodes will constantly go offline as admins get fed
up with running them. We need the ability to install and run server software
as easily (almost) as we can install something on our phones.

Maybe a layer on top of Ubuntu Server, with a baked in web UI so that any Joe
can get a DO droplet and start serving.

~~~
gbhn
You'd appreciate sandstorm.io

~~~
teleclimber
I was a backer when it came out but it has not become what I had hoped it
would be.

It seems the need to alter the applications to work as a sandstorm app means
most apps were a few versions behind and often contained bugs. I tried doing
some of the simplest things and got major fails, so I let it go.

Plus it didn't handle the web-centric use case well (only static content [0]),
which makes its usefulness very limited as a server-side platform.

[https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/web-
publishin...](https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/web-publishing/)

------
infinity0
The author includes an incorrect diagram swapping around the definitions of
distributed vs decentralised, then ignores that one of the design criteria of
the internet was to survive against nuclear attack.

Google's 40 centralised global datacenters wouldn't stand up very well to that
sort of thing. Centralisation only works when nobody stronger is around to
compete with.

~~~
j2kun
You don't think Google could survive losing a single data center? Cloud users
might lose some data, sure, and it'd likely cause issues, but I bet search
wouldn't go down.

~~~
infinity0
You think the world only has 1 nuke?

Also it looks like 40 was an overestimate by me, the real number is 15:
[https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html)

------
ilaksh
What I think will happen is that we will see a different type of
decentralization become popular. Common platforms are needed or convenient.
Right now these platforms are generally controlled by large companies with
something approaching monopolies in various markets. For example, Amazon
provides services and a destination that help people sell things. The problem
is Amazon is a company that also sells things and is trying to maximize
profits. So vendors are competing with the company running their vending
platform.

Uber provides a platform for people to make money with their cars and to get
around. It has the large network that drivers and riders need. But they are
also so dominant that there is very little competition and so they can price
things unfairly.

My belief is that A) we do need common platforms but B) the monopoly platforms
are unfair and C) decentralized technologies can provide common platforms that
aren't controlled by monopolies.

So what I think would make sense would be for drivers or even self-driving car
companies to use decentralized protocols to make one large network and
platform. That platform is open source and decentralized and used by many
competing companies that want to provide transportation services. This allows
companies access to a large pool of drivers and riders and a core technology
implementation, but does not relinquish control to one company, so we can
preserve competition and fairness.

~~~
jstarfish
We will eventually get to a point where everybody is publishing content over
arcane but decentralized protocols that may or may not be supported by their
ISPs, or with content easily easily discoverable otherwise. It will take the
emergence of aggregators and archivers to find and package access to this
content in a convenient form while also filtering out the spam.

When that happens, it will be 1996 again, and we'll be sharing stuff over NNTP
and reading it through entities like dejanews.

It was a solid plan. A lot of old Usenet content is still around, which is
more than can be said about content shared on privately-owned forums or
Facebook.

------
honorious
I would argue that abuse protection has been one of the main drivers toward
centralized systems.

Many goals of fully decentralized morality-neutral platforms are in conflict
with the expectations of people to be protected from harm while using the
internet. Centralized platforms get closed to providing such a protection
(even if flawed).

There is tons of research in decentralized methods for protecting against
abuse (huge research topic in the 2000), yet not much has really worked
(Bitcoin solves SOME, but it still suffers of many other abuse problems).

Small-scale federated solutions (where all participants know each other) are
potentially better on that front, but I don't think they will be profoundly
different from solutions where control is centralized. There will need to be
coordination in response to problems, hard to see how different parts of the
system might implement profoundly different policies about content, anonymity
without splitting the group.

So, my conclusion is that solutions with centralized control are dominating
the market not because a few evil corporations are conspiring to steal the
control away from the free people, but because they DO provide a much safer
environment for regular people to do regular things, despite all downside.

~~~
DenisM
Email is a working example of federated network, and it’s _profoundly_
different from Facebook. And not any more abusive than Twitter.

~~~
bunderbunder
Twitter is pretty abusive. And email used to be even worse.

It didn't get decent until it people started flocking toward centralized
solutions like GMail, which (coincidentally or not) did a pretty decent job of
reining in spam and viruses.

~~~
syshum
The industry got good at that, Google is not a magical spam filter in fact in
some ways it is not even really that great at all.

There are many many ways to achieve the same or better results for spam
protection they by using google

~~~
tim333
Such as? I switched to gmail mostly for the spam filtering.

------
AJ007
It is worth pointing out that the "winning" centralized systems are largely
built using decentralized systems.

A lesson to start ups is to be very careful building your product by
assembling pieces of commercial centralized systems. Make sure if one part
goes up in smoke (Facebook deprecates an API, the App store bans you, Google
Cloud API pricing quadruples, etc.) you can easily swap in out for something
else.

Another thing to consider is that centralized systems die. When support ends,
but users are still there, software systems may decentralize. Take a look at
"dead" MMOs that are still live because someone wrote a server emulator. Or,
out of date DOS games which can be run in high resolution on a modern GPU
because someone bothered to release the source code.

------
AndrewKemendo
Peer-to-peer sharing in the 90s was the best example of decentralization that
really worked, grew really quickly and had a massive user base.

Napster was probably the most successful consumer decentralization software
ever with something like 25M users in 2001.

Sci-Hub, Torrent video sites etc... are very popular and those are all
decentralized with torrents.

So it's not that decentralization can't work, it's that legal structures won't
allow it to work, because decentralization doesn't play nice with locking down
IP.

~~~
atomical
The examples you listed gained many users because they were (and are) sharing
content that they do not own. Imagine peer to peer sharing of personal photos
and videos by the users that own the copyright.

The difference in outcome may be due to less economic incentive. It's easy to
share photos on instagram and it's much more difficult to, say, download 20
academic papers without emptying one's bank account. There is a cost to the
user to sharing photos with instagram. The cost hasn't been realized by the
average user.

[https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/](https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/)

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I disagree, I think it's because they let users access content easier and
cheaper than the standard way.

Music sharing is basically dead because of Spotify, Youtube Red etc... so they
solved the simplicity problem, and the cost wasn't worth putting up with the
problems of music torrents, which made decentralization benefits moot.

There isn't any reason you couldn't make photo sharing decentralized as easy
as instagram, but Instagram isn't photo sharing it's social networking, and
decentralized social networking hasn't shown that it's easier/better than
centralized.

~~~
atomical
Hasn't centralized social networking proven to be a complete disaster? The
user has become the product.

------
dragonsh
I think the main reason decentralization lost is not due to technology, but
trust and network effect. Like we will deposit hard earned money in a bigger
bank which has less chances of failure, even if internally it might not be
safe and they will need our help to bail them out. More and more people
deposit the money the bigger the bank.

Like in real world we are responsible to support monopoly and large
centralized companies, it's the same we did with internet and internet
companies.

~~~
18pfsmt
>reason decentralization lost

Nothing has lost, the story is still evolving. Most people have only ever been
on one social network: FB. People are now getting comfortable with Twitter,
and Mastodon (or something like it) will eventually make more sense to the
mainstream, non-technical audience.

~~~
dragonsh
You are right that some apps will become popular and they will become part of
centralized backbone. People using Mastodon or any other decentralized apps
based on Kadmelia DHT and other technology will still be using Android, ios,
Mac or Windows as primary base platform. Only very small subset of people will
use Linux. So in the end, it will still be dependent on centralized
infrastructure. It's not just about one or two apps but the overall internet
architecture and its control and dependence on bigger company. Now as Apple,
Google, Microsoft and Amazon lay their cables across oceans, acquire ISP's and
telecom, will control from packet switching network to application delivery
used by normal person.

------
simonjgreen
I may be feeling a touch pedantic, perhaps I just live in a different world
being on the ISP side, but the Internet is not centralised at all. Large
quantities of traffic ends up going to certain central locations, but the
network itself is decidedly decentralised. Just look at LINX for example and
the other major IXs, nobody there is telling everyone else where to send their
packets, they just go where needed. In fact LINX as an organisation is a
members organisation run by its members with each one, big or small, having
one vote.

IXs, BGP, RIRs like RIPE, and the proliferation around the globe of access
ISPs, all prove how decentralised the Internet is.

But if the point the article is trying to make is "all this content is being
hosted in fewer and fewer locations and that's bad" then I completely agree.
It damages choice and hugely increases the blast radius of service outages.

Now if Amazon and Facebook started offering end user connectivity, that's the
time to really worry. _cough_ Google.

------
poisonborz
I don'think it would be too hard to sell decentralized, even in general terms.
You can buy a tomato in a supermarket, most people do so. Yet a large amount
of people buy it from farmers on markets, also a lot grow it themselves.
Everybody prefers local, homegrown tomato over supermarket one, always, even
if that is cheaper, controlled and easier to get, everyone understands the
differences, even while knowing nothing about how to grow a tomato.

Such differences would also be increasingly trivial for apps and data we use
daily. Customization, inherent in every individual, would also be a powerful
driving force. Why letting FB/Google etc at our data requires also less and
less explanation.

------
zby
Decentralized is good for experimenting, testing all the possibilities in
parallel. Once we have a working model - and one with network effects - the
play is about squeezing the last bites of efficiency and that is better done
centralized.

------
gcmartinelli
there's a relevant gap in his 'history of the internet' analysis where
centralized web was basically all that existed for users (i.e. AOL walled
gardens).

as many things in society, these internet trends seem to follow cycles of
discovery/innovation and improvement/cost-efficiency.

and the same way the previous centralized web crumbled with the appearance of
novel services, so will the current centralized networks. trust in innovation.

------
pjkundert
I suggest looking at the Holochain project.

[https://developer.holochain.org](https://developer.holochain.org)

It’s operational today (prototype stage), and solves many of the problems that
have prevented the roll-out of distributed systems in the past. Useful right
now, and moving fast toward alpha stage, with high scalability.

This is going to have shocking effects in many fields where decentralized
solutions have previously been difficult to scale.

------
jvanderbot
Maybe this blog can survive on a single server answering direct calls from
modems, but last time I checked, decentralization of content delivery was the
rule, not the exception.

Centralized content with decentralized systems won. And they're doing so well
it all appears centralized.

------
nicodjimenez
An inconvenient truth in the golden age of crypto mania. Even crypto itself
cannot put up a good fight against centralization, as companies like Bitmain
and Coinbase dominate the landscape.

Decentralized protocols and centralized services on top of those protocols is
the future.

------
leowoo91
Email is decentralized, works great.

~~~
pjkundert
Unfortunately we’ve lost most of the great parts, due to the fact they were
easy to attack and hard to defend...

It’s not really practical to run your own mail server anymore. This is from
someone who’s been running a triply redundant MTA for over a decade. Works
great — but I couldn’t describe to someone how to do it, without telling them
in the next breath not to bother.

Also, sending email was trivial and totally decentralized (any script could do
it manually in a few lines of code), but that no longer works; now an
authenticated connection back to a centralized industrial-scale sender is
required. Easy, just not distributed anymore.

The next gen, however, _is_ going to be totally decentralized, and end-to-end
authenticated and encrypted. Very exciting times:

[https://developer.holochain.org](https://developer.holochain.org)

------
PoespasAR
Its just the beginning of decentralized. These articles are so easy to write.

------
erikpukinskis
It's the wrong year to pick winners and losers. There's a huge amount of
stress in the system right now. The coming quakes will drastically reshape the
landscape.

Let's check in around 2030 and see if centralized is still winning.

------
nixpulvis
in the energy world (power grids), there are very practical advantages to
decentralized generation. It actually makes for a good example of similar
pros/cons to the kind of (de)centralization this post is talking about.

------
vegas
This article presents absolutely nothing as regards an actual argument about
how to write computer programs. That's enough to say about it.

------
tranchms
Why don’t we create network systems that model real social networks?

Can’t we combine centralization and decentralization?

Must it be all one or the other?

------
arisAlexis
isn't the author aware that Kardashian is into Bitcoin and publicly announced
it?

------
dustingetz
7\. Killer app

