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?

  • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    2 days ago

    Sorry if I came across as condescending, I assumed you genuinely didn’t know. Part of the reason why those services never caught on is precisely that barely anyone knows them.

    I disagree that more federalized always means better, because it has serious issues:

    1. What if you are offline? I’d like it if messages would eventually find me even when my computer is off, or I am in a remote area, a basement… even worse for file sharing.

    2. Power. Modern always-on devices like smartphones are so power efficient because they mostly are sleeping in a standby mode. Every now and then, they wake up, check if something important happened, and immediately go back to sleep. If you want to serve data from a phone, you need a way worse running / asleep ratio, meaning a lot more battery drain. A central-ish server can efficiently do the small bits of work from many people in a place with plenty of electricity and on hardware that is suited for it.

    3. Discovery is a hard problem. Having one or more central sources of information simplifies things a lot.

    4. Management/admin effort. Instead of hundreds of slightly different installations, you have one, maintained by a few people who know what they are doing. Much more efficient.

    But for example, all of the things I mentioned can be self-hosted. Granted, some like IRC are not federated in the modern sense of the word, but I would argue that “any single group of friends can set up their own server with a raspberry pi in someone’s closet” is already pretty good. Especially if your goal is to avoid the corporate surveillance state or censorship.

    • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      No offense taken!

      Why the fediverse hasn’t taken on is probably as simple to explain as why linux hasn’t. It’s a whole load of things IMO.

      I think you can’t conflate decentralised and “federalized”, the second do depend on a central server, under all the decentralised stuff.

      1. See my link 😁

      2. This is probably true if a benevolent server was considered (not publicity filled fb, x, …), but it would not have the benefits a decentralised system would (takedown safe for example)

      3. This is up for debate IMO, if we forget about the publicity budgets and predatory algorithms that make people flock to the centralised systems, you could as easily promote a centralised system as a decentralised IMO (the “publicity” can be centralised, why not?), but a decentralised system would grow organically (so just different). And even if it did grow way slower, it would, again IMO, have its place.

      4. Depends on what you are doing, is it “personal web pages” then no moderation needed, is it a fediverse-like twitter/fb/… then yes (like lemmy) but if it’s truly decentralised then nobody owns your data (except yourself) so I guess it’d be more of a inversed system where you attach yourself to others. But yes, if there is a forum then moderation is needed. Also, the soft can be unique, and the underlying protocol of course, so no need to have loads of softs even if everyone can make its own.

      The friend group is a nice one, but it lacks discovery, a true decentralised system would let you add/temove users from your groups, for example.