
Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves - okket
https://medium.com/@jbackus/resistant-protocols-how-decentralization-evolves-2f9538832ada
======
oelmekki
That was a great read, thanks to the author for making sense of entangled
history between decentralization and file sharing.

I don't see why they seem to conclude that decentralization can only exist to
circumvent the law, though : it's not because it happened like that in the
past that it can only happen like that in the future.

The author is noticing that privacy is a big concern nowadays, but is somehow
discarding quickly that remark. I see it as fundamental. Nowadays, privacy is
not just a theme for activists or weirdos whom most people think "they're
going too far". Nowadays, my aunt and my grand mother speak out privacy
concerns about facebook (ironically, on facebook). There is also in the
general public mind this vague idea that we're allowing a few companies to be
stronger than governments (and thus, than democracies) and that they now own
internet.

All of this is very fertile ground for decentralization, we'll see if that
ground expands or shrinks, but this is clearly not about working around the
law.

~~~
jbackus
Author here, thanks for reading!

Regarding "decentralization can only exist to circumvent the law", I don't
think that in the long term (>5 years out). I touched on this a bit in another
comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641098)

Regarding privacy, I'm with you there, but I'm very skeptical that very fuzzy
privacy concerns can switch enough people away centralized systems with
network effects (FB, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube). I think these systems _will_
see adoption from a few groups:

\- Privacy advocates and people otherwise interested in the tech by itself \-
Ostracized groups. For example, see how Voat (not a decentralized system, but
an example of a Reddit clone with a ideological mission) wound up as a hub for
the alt-right. \- The most extreme people trying to boycott platforms like
Twitter. For example, people demanding way more censorship from Twitter that
are trying to make Mastodon happen because it has content warning stuff and
other anti-harassment stuff from what I've heard \- Communities that are
forced out by the law, like r/DarknetMarkets moving to Dread:
[https://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-
decentralization-...](https://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-
decentralization-d813dcf653fc#0bc0)

So, subcommunities definitely will exit I think but whether they go to other
centralized systems depends on UX (which is harder with decentralization)
unless a legal reason makes decentralization the only option.

~~~
oelmekki
Hi, thanks for reply.

I see your point ; I think there is actual and genuine interest in privacy and
decentralization from what I see within my friends circle, but I may be biased
because I'm active around ssb myself (and my friends may very well be
interested in this because ... I'm interested in it). Time will tell :)

Regarding incentive for legal reasons, there's an other possible one that may
happen (mentioning it for exhaustivity). Yesterday, I was reading an article
about how an extreme-right candidate was favorite in brasilian elections. I
was thinking : "oh look, an other fascist about to seize power". It feels like
it's been a recurring theme this decade. And this is terrifying : could you
imagine what the gestapo would have been with access to facebook data?

It doesn't even need the entire world to go mad before the incentive for
privacy becomes very strong, 10 or 20 countries with strong engineers would be
enough to kickstart it.

------
dane-pgp
I feel like the next frontier for decentralisation is the need for
decentralised websites. If a website just contains read-only static text then
it can perhaps be replaced by a PDF shared over bittorrent, but I don't think
there's yet a very good technology that can be built into mainstream web
browsers and that allows complex web apps to run (including functionality like
searching and posting comments) in a domain-agnostic way. Hosting the website
as a Tor hidden service probably achieves something similar to
decentralisation, but support for the Tor network is unlikely to be included
as standard on most operating systems.

One set of technologies that might get us closer, though, is allowing offline
signing of websites. This would mean you could trust the public key for a
webapp once, and then run that webapp from any domain that serves it
correctly. Any data sent or received by users of the webapp (like comments or
likes or bids, etc.) would have to be signed by the keys of individual users,
meaning a malicious server could only filter messages you send and receive,
but not spoof them. For persistence of data across sessions, and
synchronisation between the mirrors, the back-end data store could be a web-
API database accessed over Tor by the servers hosting these mirrors of the web
app.

~~~
qaute
The IPFS [1] is close to this. Websites (and all other resources) are P2P
hosted with a distributed hash table. For example, there's an reasonably
uncensorable Wikipedia mirror [2].

I don't know what the state of web apps on IPFS is, but believe some people
are working toward a pubsub-based system.

[1] [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/) [2]
[https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-
wikipedia/](https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/)

~~~
marknadal
Decentralized web apps already exist, built with our tool (
[https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) ). For instance:

\- Decentralized Reddit ( [https://notabug.io/](https://notabug.io/) ) can
push terabytes of daily P2P traffic.

\- Decentralized YouTube ( [https://d.tube/](https://d.tube/) ) gets millions
of uniques every month, built with IPFS/Steem/GUN (upcoming release will have
end-to-end encrypted private messaging).

There are plenty of other dApps being built. This isn't an Ethereum pipedream,
you can build them today! We'll even be releasing an IPFS storage adapter for
GUN coming up soon, too!

~~~
icebraining
How is GUN related to dApps? The server seems like a regular daemon running on
a regular machine.

~~~
marknadal
The apps built with GUN are decentralized (thus "dApp", the browser can even
store/serve data), however browsers still suck with WebRTC, so there are
fallbacks to WebSocket and stuff, but the dApps do not require/depend upon a
daemon/central host.

Hey, your Odoo apps look pretty neat. I'd love to learn more about how you've
managed to make a business on top of OSS, wanna chat? Check my profile for my
email. :)

------
ekimekim
This got me thinking about Mastodon, Peertube, etc. These are decentralised
services for sharing content. Their user-base mainly favours them, iiuc,
because the operators of centralised services were being too heavy-handed in
their restrictions on content - not just legal but objectionable in various
other ways (eg. adult content, instructions on making explosives, or fair-use
of copyrighted material).

The article suggests that in each step we'd expect a decentralised solution to
make the smallest possible change, and indeed we do: All these services work
by decentralising the operator. Every mastodon instance is able to censor
itself, or its own view of the other instances, but when this kind of failure
occurs users can easily find another instance that is more accommodating.

------
robertAngst
Is decentralization cheaper or more expensive than centralization?

I cannot come to a conclusion on that question.

~~~
okket
I guess that question gets answered when the last email was sent and all
communication happens through WhatsApp or similar.

~~~
wolfgke
> I guess that question gets answered when the last email was sent and all
> communication happens through WhatsApp or similar.

Not so easy: There are lots of other factors than cost which decide what wins
in a market, such as

\- trends/hypes

\- convenience

\- being available at the right time (in the right place)

\- ...

