I have a website (well, multiple websites actually). I host them on cheap webhosts, which there are hundreds of in my country. These websites/domains can communicate with other websites by sending emails from my domains, or by clicking a hyperlink (thanks Tim) to visit other websites and webpages. I get updates by RSS feeds. I would say the decentralization works, for a quarter of a century already.
One thing I really would like to have and get working, is a little selfhosted homeserver, instead of putting my websites on someone else's servers (although cheap). It becomes more peer-to-peer this way, and I'm only relying on an internet service provider. The best thing is already suggested by the article: how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!?
> how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!?
Completely not cool, that is, pretty hot. And short-lived.
Mobile devices are only practical because they don't work 80-90% of time. Being awake for longer requires larger batteries. Being suddenly popular and thus withstanding much more load would just physically kill a node, by depleting its battery quickly and suddenly.
The luxury of peer to peer networks requires either a large power supply, or a limited availability of each node. If you introduce super-nodes with good power and constant connectivity, where weaker nodes can post their data to be cached and replicated, you just invent servers again.
> Being awake for longer requires larger batteries.
What if you remove the battery altogether and use the phone as an alternative to a Raspberry Pi, instead of creating more e-waste?
If Android (or any other mobile OS) wasn't so locked down, we'd definitely be able to take more advantage of devices like that and not just for hosting stuff - they already have mobile data support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a microphone, camera, GPS, accelerometer and so on.
In regards to load, my blog did fine with one of the articles on the front page of HN way back, and it was served from a container that has about 1 CPU core given to it and under 1 GB of RAM (albeit it's still a rented VPS otherwise).
My homelab server CPUs have a TDP of 35W and I use those for CI as well with no issues. My netbook has a CPU with a TDP that's around 15W and it can serve web apps with no issues, alongside Visual Studio Code and a desktop environment.
A phone is almost certainly good enough for simple workloads as well, like serving static files or interacting with a SQLite database, assuming that your content wouldn't get too popular.
But having it be a server while in your pocket is probably too niche of a use case, rather than having it on a shelf somewhere, connected to a power cable.
Except that it is much simpler and more straightforward for someone to pay for a super node to help serve all their content. You don't need to mess with setting up the server instance, configuring DNS or setting up services, and if you want to change super node providers you only have to reconfigure your client and you're done, no initial setup or DNS shenanigans.
No DNS shenanigans? Maybe! Then what, DHS shenanigans?
There must be some scheme of symbolic addressing. DNS, of all things, is reasonably decentralized, it only requires SOA records for top-level domains to be propagated in concert. (It has other shortcomings though.)
Probably something in the vein of a DHT. There is still a lot of progress that can be made in that area, in terms of performance, content addressing and cooperative/adversarial search strategies though.
I pick on DNS because it's an easy example of another thing you have to manage hosting your own content. Also, domain names are a hot mess and people mostly prefer to have identities ala Facebook, which could easily built into a decentralized protocol.
No real point on my part here. There's just a lot of colorful discussion here and in sibling threads. I found these to be fascinating reads and they feel relevant. I believe the author was running the server from second link on their daily driver.
Author writes about using Termux as a webserver. Do note Termux's having to target older API versions if anyone is really contemplating the feasibility today.
I think we are talking about repurposing a small computer previously used as a mobile handset into a server. This is already possible and done with Android and Linux handsets. It is just not as straightforward as using a RPI with a distribution such as Yunohost.org. It's scalability is also very limited, but it kind of fits the low power low cost factors of the RPI.
No, nobody was talking about that. The context was clearly one's personal Android phone (in the article), and "your smartphone" in the original comment (not "an extra/old"). The one you carry with you all the time. The article even admitted you'd have to "carry an extra battery".
OK. There are P2P mobile based social media services such as https://www.manyver.se/ already running. Although every node is serving/getting messages, I am not sure they can be called servers.
No, I - as the OP - said also "pocket computer" very explicitly. If a 'personal mobile server' would become reality, it's not going to be a smartphone + something else on top.
Ok, but yes it would still be cool if any of these devices, whatever you want to call them, could be plugged in somewhere and act as a server.
> (not "an extra/old").
So then you concede completely, that anyone talking about these devices, would indeed be correct to say that it is cool to turn these devices into servers.
Great, you agree that there is a usecases for this.
> If you introduce super-nodes with good power and constant connectivity, where weaker nodes can post their data to be cached and replicated, you just invent servers again.
No you don’t. Not if the super nodes are almost automatic. The problem with servers is having to manually admin them.
Good points! I know my smartphone works for two days on a small battery because smart engineers did smart efficient stuff to make it a reality. So I agree that smartphones as we know them are not a good fit. Let's now try to imagine a pocket computer that can do the job!
Ancient systems like FidoNet [1] used various tricks to sidestep similar limitations at the times of dialup-only connectivity. This included opportunistic store-and-forward schemes for sending messages, hand-crafted routing between personally acquainted peers, and coordinated connectivity windows known as "zone mail hours".
FidoNet worked pretty well, as long as you did not mind your message to reach a destination within 3-4 hops by tomorrow. Maybe it's the right pace of communication in certain cases. Not tweet-style, but blog-style.
Super-nodes with around-the-clock connectivity also existed, advertised themselves as such, and were a great help.
I don't really buy that. I run a Syncthing daemon on my Android device and barely notice the difference in battery life. The CPU time that a program like FTP would use in the background seems fairly minimal to me.
That depends. How well-equipped do you think your average person with a smartphone (or pocket computer) is to manage and secure a server?
This is not a snarky comment. The thing in your pocket can, today, be convinced to act as a webserver and host your website. It just comes with all the downsides of having to host, administer, manage, and secure a website.
In practice, you can either have a secured computer or one that offers useful services over a network. Through decades of sincere effort and many billions of dollars of investment, it has turned out that you cannot make hosting, administering, managing and securing easy as pie and still have something that can do all the things users would like it to do as a server. We can't even reliably do this for non-server computers.
It's worth considering that sometimes our desires are in tension with another in ways that are not readily resolved.
Is there actually a meaningful difference in how vulnerable these consumer computers are when acting as a server versus when not? Like, sure, being a server means that anyone who wants to send an exploit to them can - but realistically anyone who wants to send an exploit to them has dozens of vectors available already (SMS, pushed posts from dozens of social networks, website ads, ...)
No, in that you're completely correct that network positioning and exposure does not inherently increase the vulnerability a computer has. It does not introduce new flaws.
Yes, in that it's not just about vulnerability. A computer turned off may be in theory vulnerable, but in practice not exposed. Exploits happen when vulnerabilities meet opportunities. The more a computer is exposed, the greater the opportunity for exploitation. Making something publicly available, such as it offering up a website, is a pretty dramatic way to increase its exposure. As you might imagine, trying to perform useful work with data coming in over a network provides many more chances to try to exploit something than silently dropping all inbound connections. In extreme cases, you get things like the numerous worms of the 2000s.
It is precisely because of this excellent point you have made that modern networks are designed with layers of security. That there are other vectors is a concern you wisely and rightfully point to, but each vector is concerning and the ease with which any given one can be guarded or exploited is considered.
tl;dr: There's a substantial and very meaningful difference.
> Making something publicly available, such as it offering up a website, is a pretty dramatic way to increase its exposure. As you might imagine, trying to perform useful work with data coming in over a network provides many more chances to try to exploit something than silently dropping all inbound connections.
Sure; what matters is, roughly, the extent to which the computer is doing something complex based on data sent by an attacker. The thing is that these days people's pocket computers do so much complex work with user-submitted data, compared to low-level protocol parsing which mostly hasn't changed for decades, that I struggle to believe adding the latter would actually increase attack surface that much. Back in the '90s, where the main way to send data from computer A to computer B was for computer A to open a socket connection to computer B, that thinking made sense, but today almost everyone is consuming a firehose of data from random strangers via, well, almost every app on their phone and every website they visit.
My problem is mostly that the thing in my pocket runs Android or iOS, but I'm working on that problem.
> How well-equipped do you think your average person with a smartphone (or pocket computer) ...
Average people were pretty handy with computers and internet, even before the smartphone entered the scene and made it even more handy for even more people. So that would be the challenge in bringing some 'personal mobile server' to life.
At this point your average person does a poor job of securing their home non-server. So while people might be pretty handy with their computers in some ways, I think it's reasonable to consider that they're very much not handy at all in some pretty important ones. Home computers are frequently unpatched, poorly maintained, and malware-riddled.
I don't think turning them into servers is likely to improve this situation much.
>> One thing I really would like to have and get working, is a little selfhosted homeserver, instead of putting my websites on someone else's servers (although cheap). It becomes more peer-to-peer this way, and I'm only relying on an internet service provider.
As the cliche goes: "If I can do it, you can too" . If you have multiple sites I have no doubt you could get one up and running without much trouble.
I have a few RPI 3b+ and 1x RPi4B that I use and host from home. Mainly just to dink around with, nothing crazy.
One thing I did was get a cheap VPS ($4/m) to reverse proxy to my home.
My next iteration is I think I'm going to actually host the site on VPS but have my home network push static files to the VPS. My site is mainly for me and this way I can fully disconnect between home and VPS.
We will see, but again, this is why I have what I have so that I can play around and try different things out.
Nice! Exactly the things that I'm thinking of playing with. Thanks for sharing.
> going to actually host the site on VPS but have my home network push static files to the VPS. My site is mainly for me and this way I can fully disconnect between home and VPS.
Smart. Thanks for this tip.
I've been looking into dynamic DNS services a bit, to see if I can/should use that for pointing to a webserver at home. Also, I'm considering to make a distinction between internetconnected but personal/private apps on one hand, and publicly served apps/sites on the other. Maybe I should just start and try to get a website online from home.
>> I've been looking into dynamic DNS services a bit
That will still expose your IP address, at least NOIP did when I was using it. NOIP was a good service but after 5 years I noticed that my IP never changed (yeah! took me a while to catch on! ;>).
The main driver for me was not showing my home IP on lookup and the yearly cost between a cheap VPS and NOIP subscription was roughly the same ~$60/year so nothing was lost there.
> how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!?
How exactly is that going to serve data when I'm in the subway or otherwise going through tunnels, or anywhere at all with bad reception...? Or when my battery dies?
This is an ideal use-case for P2P, e.g. IPFS rather than HTTP. No need for a dedicated, always on, always-accessible server at a given IP. Instead, provide the content from any number of ad-hoc, flaky devices; the site will work so long as at least one is online.
Unfortunately, the standard IPFS daemon tends to be a resource hog (otherwise I'd be running it on my Pinephone ;) )
I don't know yet, I never built one. How would you do it? Come up with new protocols, innovative techniques to work around it, solve it? Maybe just take some downtime for granted? I'm sure somebody can come up with a workable solution. HN is full of smart people!
It's not particularly challenging to set up a cache layer over a webserver. No new protocols or innovative techniques from smart people are required. Nor is it technologically difficult to accept that sometimes HTTP requests won't work.
I think the point being made here is less about new things and more that you should refine your requirements. The computer in your pocket can do anything a stationary computer can do - it's Turing-complete, so this should be obvious - subject to the limits imposed by the hardware. What limits are you, personally, willing to accept for your home-server-pocket-computer?
> and I'm only relying on an internet service provider
From a broader perspective of structuring our society so that censorship is technically difficult, we don't want to rely on a single provider. In that sense, we want both
* ISP should allow hosting from home that is fast.
* an ecosystem of website hosting providers, so ISPs are not a single point of censorship.
It's not for everybody, but the free tier Oracle instance is more than enough to serve as a great always-on server that doesn't need your home's power or ISP.
"The best thing is already suggested by the article: how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!?"
I have been running servers on a "smartphone" for years, for example SSH servers, FTP servers, HTTP servers and authoritative DNS servers, with no noticeable heat or battery issues.
I wish people wouldn't try to make Twitter over by self-prophecy.
It feels disingenuous. If it were over, where are the stats?
Twitter seemed to be in decline 3 years ago [1], but its revenue seems to have been somewhat stable since 2020 [2].
Maybe declaring Twitter dead will never go out of fashion, and we just come up with different reasons.
Maybe "Twitter is dead." is the kind of statement that ultimately keeps Twitter alive, because you need platforms like Twitter to keep fake news alive.
To be fair, I read that as a joke that actually plays on this notion. Some people within the fediverse are of the opinion that Twitter is a dying dumpster fire. The reality is that it's got a bunch more dumpster fires going on, but depending on the corner you are in, it's business as normal.
So the way I read that opening is a tongue in cheek expression in the voice of someone who is a little overeager to promote the fediverse as the Twitter Killer (when it's just... a different thing).
Edit: Shared this thought only to say that there possibly is a different interpretation to this opening. Not to invalidate what you said (should have mentioned this in the start) :)
It's been taken over by someone making erratic emotionally-driven changes every 10 minutes, firing people with domain knowledge left and right and already under various investigations. Maybe it'll be fine, but it's really up in the air.
> Maybe it'll be fine, but it's really up in the air.
Twitter was already, by all means, up in the air.
Twitter is a highly politicized environment where you get treated differently based on your views. Since it got a new captain, all those who were in power (meaning they didn't, on average, get treated unfavorably by the platform) are now claiming that the platform is dead.
I dare to say the erratic emotion is on the side of those who say Twitter is dead.
What erratic emotionally driven changes have there been?
> Firing people with domain knowledge
From the sounds of it, many deserved to be fired:
> teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
I don't see Twitter as "dying" in the near future per se, but I think people are generally winding down their activities on the platform. There's obviously a parallel trend of people trying to rid themselves of social media in general to live less online lives. (After which they dial up usage of other social platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch.)
I took that line as tongue in cheek. The whole article is kind of making fun of people who think decentralized/federated platforms will solve all problems with social media, so it's also making fun of the type of people who would say something like that.
I might have agreed with you back when people generally agreed what the term referred to. Now that it means whatever people want, I think it's a shitty heuristic to follow.
Did you stop using the telephone because anyone, including bad people, can use it to make phone calls?
What about the grocery store? Did you know that bad people use those as well?
Even going back to your bar example. I am sure that bad people go to bars all the time. And generally speaking, nobody gets kicked out, nor do people just leave.
To be fair though, I really haven't seen a change in the content on Twitter at all since Elon took over (modulo meta-discussion about Twitter itself). Time will tell I suppose
I'm an admin and I've noticed this issue as well, INTPenis. I've just resolved to taking the fediblock tag with a huge grain of salt. Stick to your values and do your own investigations instead of caving to social pressure.
Of course, that didn't work when people started doing that whole "block X or we'll block you" guilt-by-association thing. But I just hope that's a minority.
I believe a solution to this may be more decentralisation, so a small number of admins with old and bitter feuds aren't able to control the experience for the majority of users on large servers. Admins should be friends, not celebrities.
That's why I'm not part of the whole UFoI thing, but I'm sympathetic to its existence.
What do you think about giving individual users more power to moderate amongst themselves rather than having server admins do it? For example, a much more powerful "blocklist" type feature that you can share with others? So a could spend a bunch of time doing moderation, and publish a "blocklist" that other users could then install on their account so they don't see some set of people / content.
What we need is some universal moderation guidelines. Like for example; sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me.
As long as people follow the server rules, aggressively presented arguments, anger, fear, rude words said to famous accounts, should not lead to de-federation. Our rules already disallow all forms of xenophobia, transphobia, attacks, doxing and all that stuff.
End users need to take more responsibility for moderation in the fedi. That's why we have the Mute button. But people would rather take "action" with the Report button, than the Mute button.
Because they get so angry at some stranger online. You don't know anything about that person, or what they're going through.
I have experience meeting reformed nazis, previously violent people who are trying to reform. So people go through stages in life, and maybe sometimes they're a bit off, but some day that person is going to wake up and then we should be able to help them out of their daze. De-federation makes this impossible.
A nonnegotiable feature most people want from a social network is the ability to keep certain other people out, or at least fully disconnect from all people like them - at scale, as opposed to manually blocking/ignoring specific accounts. Motivations vary, simple spam and fraud is an obvious one, prohibited material (with CSAM at the extreme end) being another obvious one, but of course at some point politics also comes into play.
You can't have a technical solution to that, it's a design choice/tradeoff. You can have a highly permissionless social network, but then it's not useful for the average person because it doesn't exclude the "undesirable" content; and you can have a highly regulated social network but then it's obviously not useful for people who do want to make the excluded content; but you can't have a single social network (even if federated) for everyone, splits are inevitable.
I agree with you that some users don't want to have to manually block specific accounts, but I don't agree that the network needs to decide. People already shared around "blocklists" for Twitter, and I understand there were even apps/browser extensions that helped with it. So yeah, you could say "I trust X person to make decisions about which accounts I see", without someone else also having to agree to that same set.
If such a feature was more robustly built into a platform like Twitter then the company themselves would have a lot less pressure in making a universal decision (which guarantees some disagree with)
The feature of delegating content control is no different than defederating. The mechanism of choosing who the user delegates the decisions to are more clunky because that requires a server migration to change.
> But it chews up battery and Apple bans the iOS version for no good reason.
I'm not Apple defender at all, but if they did that I would say chewing battery unnecessarily is a pretty good reason. Of course they would likely have other reasons, actually not good ones, too.
As an example, police departments in the US are decentralized, in that there's no overarching police authority in the US; there are local police departments, various state-level police departments, and various federal departments.
The state police doesn't really have oversight over the local departments. In fact, I don't think anyone really has oversight of local police departments except possibly for local voters.
They are all bound by the various laws, but within those laws they have tremendous amounts of flexibility.
It's in their self-interest to cooperate, but they don't have to cooperate if they don't want to.
I do not live in the US, but your comment is not meant to be positive, right?
> In fact, I don't think anyone really has oversight of local police departments except possibly for local voters.
this does not feel right at all, especially with all I read about the problems with the police and the lack of accountability of the actions of individual police officers. I do not feel confident in directly overseeing something as complicated as a police force. What do you do if you feel the handling of your police force is inadequate?
I am American and interpreted his comment as positive.
I live in a small town, with a handful of police officers, and their boss (the commissioner) is elected by me and my neighbors. There's no greater accountability than that!
This isn't really about centralization. It's about federation. And as much as HNers may want it, nobody else does. Let me introduce use to the Plain Old Telephone System ("POTS"). POTS is a federated system. It's true it's also open addressing, which is a factor but not as much as you might think.
People hate POTS. You're identified by a number. It includes a (now meaningless) area code. Portability is a problem. You can switch carriers (although prepaid portability can still be an issue) but it's a process. Also, whatever portability you have disappears when you cross a border.
POTS is filled with spam. Just like email (another federated service). As soon as something is federated it becomes incredibly difficult to police bad actors. If you, as a telephone exchange has too much spam (eg robocall) traffic, you might find yourself blacklisted by large players like Verizon and AT&T. So what do you do? You "launder" such traffic with enough legitimate traffic so as to not trigger any enforcement while charging extra for known offenders. Because that is profit.
A federated system is inherently a game of whack-a-mole with bad actors while being a race to the bottom.
Messaging services like Twitter, FB (Messenger) and WhatsApp all grew and continue to exist because of centralization while federated alternatives inevitably always die or simply never gain real traction. There are real efficiency issues. For example, when policing offensive material (eg CSAM) is each entity responsible? How is that efficient? They might have to do because given material may never leave a given node.
The question you should always ask is: what problem does this solve for the user that they care about?
I think some users liked Twitter exactly the way it was, so yeah, there was no need to change anything. Other users were literally blacklisted, or blocked from search, or banned. Or they wanted to follow such people and couldn't.
Yes, some of them were actual trolls or spammers, but many were just ideologically misaligned with Twitter the company (and/or their advertisers).
I think the problem to solve is how can we allow people to communicate AND DISCOVER other people's opinions without a particular company/organization making that decision for them.
Websites aren't good enough because they aren't very discoverable and don't have a robust discussion mechanism. I don't even think Mastodon allows this because admins seem pretty opinionated and end up cutting out chunks of the fediverse without the users' consent.
I'm not sure what the solution is but that is a real problem and it does seem necessary to "decentralize" to some extent as every group will always have conflicting opinions with other groups
functionally it has become. Many people move and don't switch to a local number they just bring their old one along. Now the area code isn't really indicative of where a person lives just where they got their first phone.
I kinda prefer cooperation over decentralization. Decentralization as a design goal is a way to reach cooperation. You can have very well cooperating system parts in a centralised solution.
The thing is that most centralised platforms has been really bad at incorporating cooperation so I can understand if some people are leaning on decentralization being the only way to reach this.
Centralized platforms by necessity have a power nexus. Whoever controls that nexus, has little reason to cooperate with everybody else. Even when the arrangement is truly democratic, it still sucks for everyone in the minority.
I'm disappointed that there aren't more conversations about the merits of "distributed" vs "decentralized". Federated addresses really seem better suited for a distributed approach. Decentralization would encourage that everyone run their own instance, but in that case, what's even the point of the Fediverse?
What stops Twitter from becoming a member of the fediverse?
Like others have done in technology, they can become initially equal members, then degrade the others, and finally make it painful to use/participate with other members of the federation. This would force federation members and users to succumb and join the empire as a subject versus equal.
Or, the reverse: what stops the fediverse from becoming Twitter? Like the post shows, it seems like these apps tend to consolidate around one or two instances. So you just end up making Twitter again.
> Like the post shows, it seems like these apps tend to consolidate around one or two instances.
For now, I'd say that was probably because it's a new thing to most people and people hear "Mastodon" and, understandably, head for mastodon.social. Give it a year and I think people will be much more spread out than they are now.
0. a twitter clone backed by a few billion VC dollars will emerge with the promise to continue the practices described in the twitter files, and the refugees will flock to the warm and familiar embrace
Eh, I'm starting to suspect maybe nothing will replace Twitter. Or that nothing consistent will anyway.
We've got Mastodon, and it's doing a bit better. We had Hive, which did okay til the security issues and shut down. Cohost and Post kinda... exist I suppose? And there are a few more I can't remember.
I've got an account on each one, and about 1/10th of those I follow exist across all of them combined. Maybe most people just don't care about a Twitter replacement and are fine without one.
That timeframe might be a bit optimistic. He's also stopped paying rent and severance, apparently.
Mr. Musk also continues to cut staff and leaders, including Nelson Abramson, Twitter’s global head of infrastructure, and Alan Rosa, the global information technology head and vice president of information security, according to four people familiar with the moves.
I remember the fail whale. I suspect we’ll see it again soon. Twitter stability used to be a joke, then it evolved into something fundamentally impressive. There was a major infrastructure change brought about by some key hires iirc. I’ve also heard that Twitter would get your tweet to all your followers in 5 seconds. That will be hard to measure externally, but I’ll bet it’s one of the first things to slip.
Yeah, Twitter's situation is a risky one to say the least. Definitely not denying that it could come crashing down due to poor management decisions.
But I do question whether people will move towards any particular alternative, or whether they might even stick with other services they use instead. None of these replacements seem to quite have the pull necessary to attract most of the existing Twitter userbase, and none seem to be taking over in the same way Reddit beat Digg or Facebook beat Myspace. Perhaps the market for a Twitter esque microblogging service might decline as people spend more time on Discord/Reddit/YouTube/TikTok/whatever instead?
Hmm, I guess the only way to know for sure is to wait and see what happens when Twitter comes crashing down.
I deleted my mostly unused accounts (one of them even dating back to 2007) when the post advocating who to vote for was published. Of course, not being a heavy user made it easy to do. There are so many different ways people use Twitter, I suspect it will persist. Digg and MySpace (and maybe LiveJournal and del.icio.us) are perfect examples of a social network dying, but Twitter is orders of magnitude bigger than those were. I think Reddit and FB got a big help from the advent of mobile as it brought boatloads of new users online. That pool of new users doesn't exist in 2022.
I think there is a difference between actually caring (when you reflect on your life, it is important to you) and having a rush of dopamine that makes you feel the need to check these apps and continue scrolling.
"We're all apart, even when we're together. This is the joy - and the sorrow - of decentralization.
What's the optimal size of a server?"
The facts indicate that we just don't know and it's likely that we will not know for quite some time until we've a much better handle on and understanding of the long-term statistics about how connectivity and centralization impinges upon human behavior and how humans socially adapt—or do not do so.
That's to say we need to know both the positive and negative impacts on society of the internet with reasonable accuracy before we can make any authoritative assessment and I reckon we are nowhere near that point yet.
Let's look back a little. Until the 1970s the connections between people were reasonably stable and established, radio TV and newspapers were usually conservative and reasonably accurate in reporting - sensationalism in reporting wasn't yet commonplace. Then in the 1970s we had the arrival of radio shock-jocks, and beat-ups and sensationalism in television news and newspaper reporting became commonplace. This in-your-face type of media presentation altered the way the population thought and behaved, and the fact is we still haven't fully analyzed or accurately know the effects that those changes brought to society over the past 50 years.
The internet and social media have brought about social and political changes to the way people think and act and similarly to the collective social fabric and those effects have been much faster and dramatically greater than those that occurred in the immediate pre-internet era.
This is a huge subject and we've only just recognized how important this issue is. Next stage is to gather even more data and it'll be years before we have any definitive answers.
Decentralisation is as much a technology as it is an ideology. The technical solutions are relatively mature, but to become ingrained there has to be value shift in appreciation of the decentralisation of power, democracy, and privacy.
And we can't take for granted that society will evolve towards continued progress because it clearly won't without advocates.
You are right. But I would contend that the technical solutions still have a lot of friction.
Remember back in the day, when you just downloaded limewire or kazaa and that was all that was needed to get on a decentralized file sharing network.
Compare this to the recent experience of many people deciding on a mastodon server and joining it and figuring out how to follow people from other servers.
What I would like to see is a decentralized "city" of sites. Such a city could have space for 25-100 federated tenants, and if you go to the city, you can stroll through the tenant sites all in one.
Such a thing would make joining and using federated systems much easier in my opinion, and the easier it is, the easier it is to gain adoption, and the easier the adoption, the more likely to gain traction.
Centralization is usually cheaper and easier to manage. Don't decentralize because it seems "the in thing". There are exceptions, but they are relatively rare. Everyone wants to grow to the size of Facebook, Amazon, etc., but the unpleasant truth is you probably won't, and pre-scaling is wasteful.
I think that we need to just…de-emphasize online communication significantly. I say this, as a stranger communicating with strangers online, but I think that this activity is a lot more pleasant without having to consider all of the technological underpinnings (and the goofy name) of the Fediverse.
When I chose a social media platform in the past, I didn’t care about engagement, or who was there or how to find people, or the philosophy behind how it operated, all I really cared about that the content. I didn’t even care about the content being moderated. Why would I care about Nazis using Tumblr if I didn’t follow any?
I think that some people have become almost dependent on the concept of online social networks. Yes they are cool and all and its cool to find ideas and conversations online, but I think we are heading down a road where that intangible taste and intrigue is being lost because certain factors are being prioritized to the point where people are forgetting that if they just cared a little bit less, they could disregard the whole jumble of protocols and policies and start a message board.
> Why would I care about Nazis using Tumblr if I didn’t follow any?
This guy clearly hasn’t heard of the nazi-at-the-bar story. (Paraphrase: an usassuming guy wearing a white supremacist symbol sits and is immediately told to get out, with violence threatened if necessary, by the bartender. The bartender later explains there’s a strategy for unassuming authoritarians who don’t cause a problem end up bringing their friends and suddenly they’re driving other clientele away because it’s a nazi bar, and then it’s too late to peacefully resolve the problem because the nazis will use their numbers to fight any enforcement.)
I understand that. And it makes sense. Speaking for myself, there are other things that I also find are harmful to people who are either young, impressionable, or both. I seem to be in a bind here, using the person who I was during that period of my life (Tumblr using) as a measuring stick for how I see things today. There are clearly some faults with this.
The thing is that, if I were to affect my beliefs and moral coordinates as an expectation on social media and the channels of public discourse…I would have to settle on just a message board. I’m using message boards as just an example of a possible solution where the desired control is there minus federation (which I don’t care about).
If we all were to affect our beliefs and moral coordinates as expectations onto social media and online discourse…what would come about?
This is a conflicting topic to me. I’m aware that I’m speaking into the void here now, zimpenfish. I don’t expect you to respond or read where I’m going with all of this but you’ve got me going now.
All in all I just think that there are some issues present online that will not be solved online, necessarily. On one side are the real life matters relevant to society and our well-being. And then there are things like “open standards”…and then there’s everything in between that connects the two.
IMO the idea of decentralization is kinda flawed in todays world. I’m going to go on a somewhat long anecdote, but I promise it’ll all make sense in the end.
I recently swapped email to protonmail from gmail. Why? Because I read an article about the Terraria developer just getting banned and losing his email for no reason. “That could happen to me!”
After a long while of using proton (9 months or so) I got really tired of the lack of ecosystem (at this time there were no public apps on iOS or android besides mail) and I still had to use google for my contacts sync, notes, etc.
So what I ended up doing is moving all my shit BACK to google from proton (massive headache by the way) and then just self hosted my own email address domain. That way if google ever decides to ban me, I can hop over to Cloudflare and point the email domain to another email provider and violà!
One of my main complains with protonmail was that the search function actually kinda sucks. GMails search is so good, and the filters you can make are so easy, I could go on. That’s why google is the industry leader! But why does proton make me feel more comfortable? Zero-trust. Proton doesn’t know what is in my emails at rest, but google does.
So I propose the idea: why decentralize? Compare mastodon and Twitter (pre-Musk). The whole reason that Twitter got huge is that everyone is on it. I loved the old school “everyone had their own message board community” internet, and IRC was really cool. But the VAST majority of users don’t want that back. It’s much more convenient to load up discord to talk to people than an irc client that has like 40 different segregated communities, in the same way that it is much easier and more convenient to use Twitter than to manage all of what mastodon is.
Even then, look at something like Session (the username only fork of signal). I’m not 100% on the details, but they claim to be decentralized, but yet I don’t have to input server details. That means that there has to be some sort of centralized database or application or table that tells me where all of the servers I can connect to are (or perhaps a first server that you connect to that then spreads to another server etc)
You have 4 choices in the modern world:
google (nothing protected, totally centralized, but the most feature rich and fastest)
protonmail (centralized, protected, but not as feature rich and fast)
session (decentralized but there’s still a layer of centralization to make it easy to use, but still more complicated than the first two options)
Mastodon (fully decentralized but wildly inconvenient for the average person, significantly more difficult to use, and likely will never adopt the number of users that Twitter has)
Remember, we are the minority. Google is the best for most people, as is Twitter, as is Discord, as is iMessage or SMS, etc.
People use what is the easiest and most feature rich. Decentralized stuff will never meet all categories of feature rich, fast, and easy to use. It just isn’t possible, and if it was it would be the biggest smash hit in history and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I switched from GMail to Fastmail a while back for the same reason as you. I'm still on Fastmail. It has apps and everything else that GMail had, and a better web UI on top of that. Have you considered that perhaps you just picked an alternative that didn't really suit your requirements?
That aside, all email is pretty much as decentralized as Mastodon is, since it's all federated.
One thing I really would like to have and get working, is a little selfhosted homeserver, instead of putting my websites on someone else's servers (although cheap). It becomes more peer-to-peer this way, and I'm only relying on an internet service provider. The best thing is already suggested by the article: how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!?