Hello,
There are loads of people who dislike centralised services, like facebook, twitter, dropbox and so on, yet still no one seems to be very curious about decentralised systems. How come?
Lemmy scratches the surface with lots of centralised servers, but pushing it, everyone could have their own soft that, for example, is their “user”. A user having “facebook”/twitter/dropbox/sharing capabilities. Still no one seems to even pursue those kind of ideas. Even in theory.
Is it because the dopamine triggering algorithm wins everyone over? The fear of using a soft that communicated on an open port on your device? Or what might it be? But that doesn’t make sense to me, because people don’t even discuss it. Or am I not invited to those discussions 😁?
It should be trivial to spin up a sharing system, for example (harboring laws would protect you), or some “friends, and friends friends only” network a la facebook in tje early days.
It’s not limited by technology, and people are smart and curious.
So where are they?
Edit: I know that even if the service existed, most people wouldn’t use it and prefer Facebook et al. But that absolutely nobody has spun up one is what baffles me. Thousands work on the Linux kernel, where are the hardcore network nerds?
Not everyone can run their own instance. Aside from this being tedious if every service did that (you don’t just register an account, gotta figure out how to run it locally), you also run into networking and hardware limitations. To run an instance you need a publicly accessible device that supports that service. Someone just using their phone would have no way of accessing the service. Someone on the road would have no access (unless they also set up a home VPN to connect to their private instance). It’s just not practical.
But from that to that no geek squad have done it? My question isn’t why everyone isn’t doing it, but why it seems nobody is trying to. It’s trivial to set up on a home pc, and not that complicated to set up a RSA “user” that’s just “you” (so no login, user generation, etc). Even if you have to have a small centralised gateway (like a php script that anyone can run on a public webbserver) to alleviate the mobile phone connection (or a home connection without port forwarding) no one is doing it?
P2P is a thing, it’s just not practical for large platforms. But you’ll find lots of peer-to-peer in small-scale applications.
Well, decentralised would mean small though.
Any example of decentralised p2p apps?