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?
like https://nostr.com/
Thank you but it has already been mentioned like 4 times 😁
yeah sorry. did not go through the coments.
No worries, very good advice too …
People want something that just works. Running your own Lemmy, friendica, newpipe, etc isn’t as straightforward as accessing facebook.
There is also the network effect, everyone is on the closed system so why not also use the closed system.
Yes, but there are people running lemmy servers and so on, but nobody seems to try a completely decentralised local approach.
I’m not fishing for “why isn’t everyone doing it”, but why is nobody doing it.
Even back in the day when security was not cared about, nobody thought “what if my pc was also my ‘homepage’?” or such.
People are doing it, its just takes more then one person to manage the complexity of running a several different fediverse platforms at once.
A higher barrier to entry means less will do it.
I disagree here, if decentralised you’d not need heavy server management etc. It also would have to be done once only (and not obligatory some hashup of fediverse servers) before people can jumpstart different types of softs on top of it.
There are loads of people who dislike centralised services
You just encounter a disproportionately higher amount of them on lemmy/your-circles than the true ratio of people in society. The vast majority of people barely think about any of that stuff. Especially stupid people.
- Economies of scale - It takes more resources to run 10 services for 1k users than 1 service for 10k users. That being said, these companies get so big with so much staff that they start doing shit just to keep everyone gainfully working. Once upon a time Twitter was essentially just an SMS re-broadcaster. Probably could’ve been maintained by 3 weasels in a trenchcoat. Now… they are whatever-the-fuck they have become now.
- Mergers - companies buy out smaller companies in the same niche
- Network effect - Your mom is on FB. Your teacher is on FB. Your friend is on FB. You can connect and keep up with everyone in a single, familiar place rather than learning the idioms of a new application.
That said, that’s not me. It’s not a lot of us. I love that Lemmy/Bluesky/Mastodon/Pixelfed are small communities where you get a chance to know people and build some shallow relationships. I don’t want a following. I don’t want to sell or buy anything or be monetized. I don’t care if I “run out of content.” I’m just here to chill and socially interact with people in ways I don’t get to IRL. And if someone and I don’t get on we just ignore or block each other. I love small.
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You’d run it on your home pc or phone, so no investment needed. And you wouldn’t need to service 1k people.
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It would obviously be FOSS 😁
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Yeah the big mass wouldn’t, but nobody?
For the rest of your post, that’s what I love too here (and sincerely hate about insta, FB, etc).
- What happens if one of your posts gets popular? Suddenly everybody else is trying to view your post and your phone is overloaded with requests
No because I wouldn’t have a big network. Say 50 people for the sake of example. They check in to see what I’m up to, and sees my “Super Message”.
They might put it up on their phone, and the 72 people they have in their network can now see it, and they all can share it on and so forth, spreading it to millions of people if it continues.
But I only needed to share it with 50 people.
That’s the power of truly decentralised systems.
Manual replication has it’s own host of issues. You can read about the CAP theorem for more details. A decentralized system has good “partition tolerance” (so even if the government tries to crack down on one or two servers, the rest have copies of all the content), but bad consistency (people might have outdated copies of content). For example, if every user copies the content they want to share, what happens when the original post gets updated? Now the updates need to propagate. What happens if somebody comments on an outdated post, before the update reaches it? Should the comment get deleted?
This is a harder problem than most people realize.
Yes it’s a complex problem if you try to use it like a centralized system, who’s got authority on data N ? Lemmy has to deal with that I guess.
But IMO it doesn’t need to be made like that, you can have your data, and that’s it. If I copy your post and publish it, it’s now “mine”. And so on.
If you invite me to yours and I invite you to mine, we can also interact, like having a discussion. Each of us having authority on our data.
That can get clunky though. If I make a post, I want to see all comments on the post. I don’t want to have to hunt down all copies of the post and read the comments on each copy.
You’re talking about a fundamentally different user experience. Not just a change in underlying architecture.
Though there are ways to be more decentralized without manually replicating data. Like Nostr.
Yes totally, it would be less dopamine triggers, and more “old web” style (or a completely new type, like everyone can have their radio channel or whatever).
I’m checking out Nostr atm, that might be exactly what I’m looking for, we’ll see when I have had the time to sift through the info.
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To add to what others have said; if everyone ran their own instance, it would be a security nightmare. A billion amateurs running Internet-routable servers? It’s a hacker’s wet dream
I would say it depends on the software being run.
We have p2p file sharing used a lot and it’s not that bad.
Also there was a time when hosting your own multiplayer game server, or your own voice room chat was the norm.
It doesn’t need to be follow the activity pub protocol, it could be something more secure and idiotproof.
On paper. In practice most low-hanging fruit in almost all mature software has been thoroughly picked through, and most hackers are not coming with targeted resources and the backing of a well-funded state actor to break into your Jellyfin library. The sheer amount of paranoia people have about tech these days…
This is what I actually suspect might be a big culprit. It’s not correct however but the myth lives on for some reason.
People do, and have done for a long time. Before Lemmy was Friendika/Diaspora, before Mastodon were WordPress blogs, before Matrix it was Xmpp and before that, IRC. File sharing happens a lot through many Nextcloud and Seafile instances. There are/were countless projects to simplify selfhosting for individuals and small businesses. Every month I hear of a new small social network, “old internet” style thing, federated platform or self-hosting project.
It is all out there. It is not a technical problem.
There is just one glaring issue: you have never heard of any of these instances, because they don’t have billions of as budgets and don’t crave paying customers.
Why should a friends-only Nextcloud instance put ads in the newspaper of a foreign continent? And therefore, nobody hears of them outside the company / friend group / soccer club. Plus, with small networks there are no billionaire owners bribing officials to push out small competitiora and spreading propaganda that everyone without a WhatsApp account is weird and potentially suspicious.
Most of those (all?) have a central component.
And yes, I’m not here to invent a facebook killer 😁 it would just be nice to have something 100% decentralised (and before someone treats me as lazy again, I have done my due diligence IMO ).
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:
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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.
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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.
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Discovery is a hard problem. Having one or more central sources of information simplifies things a lot.
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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.
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.
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See my link 😁
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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)
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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.
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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.
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There are loads of people who dislike centralised services, like facebook, twitter, dropbox and so on
Are there? It seems more like 90% of people don’t care, and 9.9% say they dislike big tech, but don’t really feel it strongly enough to seriously look for alternatives.
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?
Oh, I see, by “people” you mean a few hardcore nerds just to run the server. Sure, they exist, and whatever indie version of Facebook exists. But, without people moving away from Facebook to it, there’s not much to do on them. Lemmy was a ghost town before the API Rexodus, for example, and now it’s just active enough that the large communities are rolling nicely.
Here, read this. When it comes to if a social media service is useful, the servers are like the smallest component. And, as a result, whichever server goes first has a huge advantage, and whoever started it becomes Mark Zuckerberg.
The longer I’m on Lemmy the less I think the benefits of decentralization outweigh the costs. Petty squabbling and schisms all the time. An infinite number of new bot posters from an infinite number of instances. Normal users are never going to flock to the fediverse. They would hate it here, and we would hate them being here.
Everything you say is true, but I still like it here.
me2 but I take the we would hate them being here as in having the larger mass of humanity in the sphere would ruin it. Im not 100% sure it would but often when people talk about growing the federation im like. Im pretty fine if it stays the size it is. I don’t feel we need more people to come but for those who find it hopefully they will be good additions.
everyone could have their own soft that,
So where are they?
I’m not sure we’re in a good position to question people’s laziness when “software” is too long for us to write out completely.
Lol I’m lazy because I spend time asking a question… Sorry for bothering I guess!
I think there was some project out there trying to make this, each user is an instance, reddit approach.
I don’t recall the name right now, if I remember it I will edit the comment.
Nostr is the closest to what you’re looking for I think.
I’m looking into it, seems promising but not really decentralised for what I have yet understood. I’m digging further…
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.
What do you think of Nostr?
My comment seems to not have come through (on holidays far away from cell towers).
I’m checking it out, and there seems to be some ideas, but it seems to basically be a watered down x509 signing and then “you figure out how to find stuff”. But I haven’t checked it out thoroughly yet.
I’m especially worried about the hosting part, up to now it seems dead centralised, but I haven’t finished digging…
- easier to manage/govern
- laziness
- yes and no
- not really, no
- laziness
- ask your friends
- wherever you put them
Also having your own equipment costs money
I’m talking about decentralised systems, which would communicate with like your friends and family for example. Your phone would wildly exceed the hardware needs.
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?
Convenience
