On: On Dat

[SturgeonsLaw]

> The prolonged obsolescence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin and torrents means we’re maybe skeptical or jaded about any new protocols

Funny choice of examples, personally I would have pointed to bitcoin and bittorrent as two examples of distributed protocols with runaway success

[ahje → SturgeonsLaw]

Yeah, Bittorrent is actually getting fairly old compared to many other technologies in use today; it's _older than_ Windows XP. :D

[cm2187 → ahje]

A newcommer compared to nntp, which arguably is a kind of p2p network!

[_Codemonkeyism → cm2187]

Isn't nntp more of a store and forward network?

[josteink → cm2187]

nntp relied on central servers which clients connected to, so not fully decentralized.

That the servers did inter-server replication and forwarding doesn’t really change that.

[cm2187 → josteink]

But the servers are p2p between them, i.e. they propagate the content to the other servers. If you take down one of them, you can still connect to any other server to get the same data. Keeping in mind this is 1980s technology, it looks pretty close to p2p to me.

[ptman → josteink]

Federation (email, nntp, matrix) is decentralization, but it's not p2p.

[norswap → SturgeonsLaw]

Bittorrent has succeeded in that it's now widely used by publisher to distribute their content.

As a piracy/anti-censorship tools it overwhelmingly relies on the generosity of a handful of power seeders... which could theoretically be taken down though with some effort.

Also to thank is the laxism of the Russian government (and maybe others) in fighting these seeding hubs.

[kickscondor → SturgeonsLaw]

Ok, good point. I've changed the word 'obsolescence' to 'lifespan'. I think I was trying to convey something similar what you're saying: that these protocols are old and don't seem to hold as much promise as they used to.