At the same time, computer scientists and engineers need to deliver the technological burden of proof that decentralized personal data networks can scale globally, and that they can provide people with a better experience than centralized platforms.

Distrust of existing tech institutions and separatist urges will always be part and parcel of decentralized social media

We can, and should, always strive to build better, more accessible, and more inclusive technology. But decentralizing the web into walled-off silos seems unlikely to accomplish this goal.

These platforms have shortcomings on the practical level, as well. If a user needs a different app for everything they want to do online, we’re looking at a massive increase in app fatigue, the exhaustion that comes when users must download and engage with more platforms to have a semblance of an online presence and community. While the platforms offered by Meta and Alphabet are certainly not without issue, it is hard to deny the convenience of their established existence, which makes it possible to communicate, be entertained, shop, and more all in the same place. By contrast, users of decentralized platforms will need to download a slew of apps for everything they want to do online, because these features will no longer all exist in one place.

Power comes from organized groups. If you want people to have power, then you want to help them connect with others and teach them how to carry out effective advocacy together. That’s hard.

It’s not a technology problem. It’s not something that a slick website solves. Building power is a social, societal, institutional challenge.

Some obvious but useful DAO design or analysis questions are:1. What is being decentralized? (technically, economically, or politically),2. Who or what is being made autonomous, and from who or what?3. What is being automated?4. What is being organized?From here, subjective goals, beliefs and values can be articulated to determine design choices.

NATM Principles Data extraction is illegitimate. There is nothing normal about using data to control us or target us for commercial or political purposes. Speed cannot circumvent ethics. Civil society —not governments or businesses— should be the first and last authority in deciding if a technology should exist. Saying “No” is a practical solution. A clean and quick break from extractive technologies is not possible, but a collective statement of refusal is an important first step. Other platforms are possible. Alternatives exist. We need to promote the use of non-extractive digital media platforms and support their implementation by our member communities. One voice, multiple solutions. While our communities might have different goals and agendas, we need to act as a global coalition to enforce the regulation, taxation and eventual elimination of extractive technologies.

Bitcoin was an interesting idea for a decentralised currency, until someone thought they could profit from it. There were interesting games that people enjoyed in the crypto space until people inevitably turned them into a pure profit making ventures. And the one I personally feel most bitter about: the decentralised web is a real movement that really fucking matters. Web3 ate up that movement and fucked it up for years.

A water potable water supply that is say for three or four suburbs in a city together, and there'll be a standalone system. So if that system needs maintenance and goes down for a bit, the systems around it keep going. Whereas at the moment, if you have one problem in a water plant, the whole city goes down.

The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between "Bellheads" (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and "Netheads" (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"): https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

hat we want is to be able to leave Facebook and still talk to our friends, instead of having many Facebooks.

These attacks affect both the current single-collateral Dai (SCD or ‘Sai’) and the upcoming multi-collateral Dai (MCD) implementations, as well as similar systems with on-chain governance.

introduce frictions that make it harder for an attacker to exercise voting power even once they have acquired tokens.

progressively decentralizing

April 2, 2021

A great unbundling, resulting in a speedy rebundling into the exact same structures that existed before?

a way to transparently discover related blogs that avoids hidden algorithms

One is to assume that such remodeling rests on a theoretical fantasy about how social movements work in practice. Another is to concede that, whereas some such decentralization might be feasible, absolutely nothing guarantees that, as far as efficacy is concerned, decentralization beats centralization.The first view—that social movements will never be able to transcend hierarchies and replace them with horizontal networks—was cogently expressed by Jo Freeman in 1972 in her landmark essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman argued that hierarchies are bound to emerge anyway, and that pretending that they do not exist simply lets unacknowledged leaders escape accountability. The Internet has not fundamentally altered these dynamics. If anything, it has only complicated them, as the number of communication channels that elite factions can exploit has exploded. Consider how a participant in the Occupy protests put it in a provocative post for The Daily Kos:One of the consequences of just how difficult and time consuming participating in the movement became is that key players stopped showing up. Well not exactly; they still showed up, but mostly for side conversations, informal gatherings, and the meetings that planned what would happen at the public meetings. Using social media ... they formed an invisible guiding hand that simultaneously got shit done, avoided accountability, and engaged in factional battles with each other ... you know what's worse than regular same-old elites? An [sic] barely visible elite that denies it is an elite and can't ever be called to account.But these elites never provided the kind of efficient centralizing machinery that Occupy Wall Street needed to convert millions of people curious about its cause into card-carrying members of the movement. This failure can be partly ascribed to the absence of coherent demands, but it must also be blamed on the movement’s proud lack of organization, which is how decentralization often ends. So, while Occupy Wall Street may have had plenty of unacknowledged leaders, it had no intermediate structures for scaling up; those—unlike shadow elites—do not just emerge on their own. Another participant in the protests put it this way:Systems did emerge to engage newcomers. But those systems.... were not nearly as effective as the moment demanded ... some of the email addresses floated around as a primary point of contact were left unchecked, accumulating more than 11,000 unanswered emails.... Meetings would be announced at a particular location and then held somewhere else. Newcomers would show up for working group meetings, add their name to a list passed around for future contact, and never hear from anyone again. It's nearly four months since the occupation and there still isn't a clearly labeled sign up page. Hell, there isn't even an official public facing website that represents OWS.

But Johnson is completely blind to the virtues of centralization. In discussing 311, he lauds the fact that tipsters calling the hotline help to create a better macro-level view of city problems. But this is a trivial insight compared with the main reason why 311 works: Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to centralize—not decentralize—previous models of reporting tips. Here is how Accenture, the firm that assisted New York in its switch to the 311 system, describes the origins of that project: “[Before 311], customers looking for government assistance were confronted with more than 4,000 entries on 14 pages of the NYC telephone book, and more than 40 resource-intensive call centers were required to direct inquiries to the right city offices. The Mayor’s vision was that of a high-performance, centralized, all-purpose call facility, accessible through the simple-to-remember 3-1-1 phone number.”Johnson’s internet-centric worldview is so biased toward all things decentralized, horizontal, and emancipatory that he completely misses the highly centralized nature of 311. The same criticism applies to his treatment of the Internet. Had Johnson chosen to look closer at any of the projects he is celebrating, he would find plenty of centralization efforts at work.7 Consider Google: when it comes to user data, today Google runs a much more centralized operation than five years ago. Back in 2008, my Google searches were not in any way connected to my favorite YouTube videos or to events on my Google Calendar. Thanks to Google’s new privacy policy, today they are all connected—and Google, having centralized its previously disparate data reservoirs, can show me more precise ads as a result. But don’t count on Internet-centrists to include this trend under that mystical category of “Internet logic.”

New Trusted Third Parties Can Be Tempting Many are the reasons why organizations may come to favor costly TTP based security over more efficient and effective security that minimizes the use of TTPs: Limitations of imagination, effort, knowledge, or time amongst protocol designers – it is far easier to design security protocols that rely on TTPs than those that do not (i.e. to fob off the problem rather than solve it). Naturally design costs are an important factor limiting progress towards minimizing TTPs in security protocols. A bigger factor is lack of awareness of the importance of the problem among many security architects, especially the corporate architects who draft Internet and wireless security standards. The temptation to claim the "high ground" as a TTP of choice are great. The ambition to become the next Visa or Verisign is a power trip that's hard to refuse. The barriers to actually building a successful TTP business are, however, often severe – the startup costs are substantial, ongoing costs remain high, liability risks are great, and unless there is a substantial "first mover" advantage barriers to entry for competitors are few. Still, if nobody solves the TTP problems in the protocol this can be a lucrative business, and it's easy to envy big winners like Verisign rather than remembering all the now obscure companies that tried but lost. It's also easy to imagine oneself as the successful TTP, and come to advocate the security protocol that requires the TTP, rather than trying harder to actually solve the security problem. Entrenched interests. Large numbers of articulate professionals make their living using the skills necessary in TTP organizations. For example, the legions of auditors and lawyers who create and operate traditional control structures and legal protections. They naturally favor security models that assume they must step in and implement the real security. In new areas like e-commerce they favor new business models based on TTPs (e.g. Application Service Providers) rather than taking the time to learn new practices that may threaten their old skills. Mental transaction costs. Trust, like taste, is a subjective judgment. Making such judgement requires mental effort. A third party with a good reputation, and that is actually trustworthy, can save its customers from having to do so much research or bear other costs associated with making these judgments. However, entities that claim to be trusted but end up not being trustworthy impose costs not only of a direct nature, when they breach the trust, but increase the general cost of trying to choose between trustworthy and treacherous trusted third parties.

The high costs of implementing a TTP come about mainly because traditional security solutions, which must be invoked where the protocol itself leaves off, involve high personnel costs. For more information on the necessity and security benefits of these traditional security solutions, especially personnel controls, when implementing TTP organizations, see this author's essay on group controls. The risks and costs borne by protocol users also come to be dominated by the unreliability of the TTP – the DNS and certificate authorities being two quite commom sources of unreliability and frustration with the Internet and PKIs respectively.

Each library is maintained in its own repository, allowing decentralized ownership and independent release cycles.

This library is part of a general project at the Internet Archive (archive.org) to support the decentralized web.

We convene the Decentralized Web Summit, dedicated to creating the Web we want and the Web we deserve. A Web that is private, safe and locked open for good.

I increasingly don’t care for the world of centralized software. Software interacts with my data, on my computers. Its about time my software reflected that relationship. I want my laptop and my phone to share my files over my wifi. Not by uploading all my data to servers in another country. Especially if those servers are financed by advertisers bidding for my eyeballs.

So while it’s nice that I’m able to host my own email, that’s also the reason why my email isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and probably never will be. By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update.

That has taken us pretty far, but it’s undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. And right now, at the application level, things that stand still don’t fare very well in a world where the ecosystem is moving.

This reduced user friction has begun to extend the implicit threat that used to come with federated services into centralized services as well. Where as before you could switch hosts, or even decide to run your own server, now users are simply switching entire networks.

Federation gives us more collective control over what changes we accept, but that comes with an unacceptable inability to adapt.

Then there’s the need to check voter eligibility, a critical piece of global verifiability. No matter what technology we use, we need a clear list of eligible voters, and each voter should get to vote only once. Ultimately, the list of eligible voters is set in a centralized way: it’s produced by the State. There’s nothing distributed about voter eligibility. Even when there is federation / delegation to individual counties, like in the US, there is a centralized effort to cross-check that a voter isn’t registered in multiple counties.

the vision is for a decentralized and open annotation infrastructure

Capitalism is an economic system that can combine centralization with decentralization.

Running a small social network is like hosting a party. It requires social intelligence, empathy, and yes, technical skills.

In either case, the goal is to allow users to install ASM “closer to home,” either on their own devices or on Web servers they trust.

So this really will be, if we do it right, a decentralized new infrastructure.

In the second post in the series, Simon makes the argument that the killer feature of decentralized systems is rule-breaking: “While a decentralized architecture can be effective at routing around a variety of different failures in a network, the type of decentralization that was achieved by Bittorrent (and by Bitcoin for that matter) has enabled routing around rules.”

Grin is easily the most technologically advanced and fascinating cryptocurrency to be released since Bitcoin. It'll be interesting seeing Bitcoin maximalists come up with logic to convince themselves to be OK with shilling it. Personally, I'm a big fan, will be buying lots of it!

According to Capital, customers can purchase Bitcoin for the sums of 50, 100 or 250 euros. The tobacco shop then provides a ticket with an alphanumeric code and a QR code, which can then be used to obtain the purchased bitcoins via Keplerk’s website. The magazine adds that Keplerk collects a 7 percent fee on each payment, 1.25 of which then goes to the tobacco shop.

The challenge that entrepreneurs undertake should be less a matter of How can I decentralize everything? than How can I make everything more accountable?

We should care less about whether something is centralized or decentralized than whether it is accountable. An accountable system is responsive to both the common good for participants and the needs of minorities; it sets consistent rules and can change them when they don’t meet users’ needs.

People enter into networks with diverse access to resources and skills. Recentralization often occurs because of imbalances of power that operate outside the given network.

Another approach might be to regard decentralization as a process, never a static state of being — to stick to active verbs like “decentralize” rather than the perfect-tense “decentralized,” which suggests the process is over and done, or that it ever could be.

Blockchains, for instance, enable permissionless entry, data storage, and computing, but with a propensity to concentration with respect to interfaces, governance, and wealth.

Rather than embracing decentralization as a cure-all, policymakers can seek context-sensitive, appropriate institutional reforms according to the problem at hand. For instance, he makes a case for centralizing taxation alongside more distributed decisions about expenditures. Some forms of infrastructure lend themselves well to local or private control, while others require more centralized institutions.

When centralization arises elsewhere in an apparently decentralized system, it comes as a surprise or simply goes ignored.Here are some traces of the persistent pattern that I’m talking about:

Decentralization is the new disruption

THE DANGERS OF DECENTRALIZATION

Social media networks provided immediate solutions to a few problems with those early blogging networks: they relieved the moderately heavy lift in getting started and they created the possibility of connections that were immediate, dense, and growing. But as those networks expanded, they both pulled authors away from their own domains — so much quicker to tweet than to blog, and with a much speedier potential response — and they privatized and scattered conversations.

An open source infrastructure for a centralized network now provides almost the same level of control as federated protocols, without giving up the ability to adapt. If a centralized provider with an open source infrastructure ever makes horrible changes, those that disagree have the software they need to run their own alternative instead. It may not be as beautiful as federation, but at this point it seems that it will have to do. Tweet

This reduced user friction has begun to extend the implicit threat that used to come with federated services into centralized services as well. Where as before you could switch hosts, or even decide to run your own server, now users are simply switching entire networks. In many cases that cost is now much lower than the federated switching cost of changing your email address to use a different email provider.

If anything, protecting meta-data is going to require innovation in new protocols and software. Those changes are only likely to be possible in centralized environments with more control, rather than less. Just as making the changes to consistently deploy end to end encryption in federated protocols like email has proved difficult, we're more likely to see the emergence of enhanced metadata protection in centralized environments with greater control.

It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not.

If XMPP is so extensible, why haven't those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world?

A recorded album can be just the same 20 years later, but software has to change.

The resource-based economy goes like this: In the future robots will do all the jobs (including creating new robots and fixing broken one). Now, imagine the world is like a public library, where you can borrow any book you want but never own it. Fresco wants all enterprise like this, whether it’s groceries, new tech, gasoline, or alcohol. He wants everything free and eventually provided to us by robots, software, and automation.

centralized systems was a less-solved problem (even at far smaller numbers). More importantly, though it was easier due to this setup, we weren’t creating network effects. Though (I believe) we had more people publishing with Blogger than anything else, that didn’t make Blogger better. In fact, it made it worse, because it got slow and harder to add features to.

You can expect to pay 50 cents a day. Or try DIY. This is where you will own your content.