"We need decentralization because centralization is bad" is a tautology. It also seems to fail, prima facie, the "human problem". Most people are not going to operate and maintain their own services and equipment. How do you get a critical mass of users for functional meshing?
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it IS one or the other though, right? We can (hopefully) agree that centralisation comes with many issues, which are even more pressing in smaller communities that don't have a high level of resources. Matrix is a pretty good example of decentralisation imho. Though it varies (c.
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Decentralised organisation with e.g. large scale software development is extremely effective - for example git and the kernel.
decentralised platforms tend to struggle as that kind of infrastructure is hard to design and run. Nonetheless, centralisation is generally bad.
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I think we might be operating on different definitions here - what would you regard as a "platform", and what would be an example of an equivalent "not a platform"?
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I see! Just to make sure I'm actually following you here - as I've seen your more recent tweet - what's your take on services like Matrix? Are they decentralised? What would be your alternative if not?
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Yeah - in that case I'm with you. I can see how that doesn't entirely solve the problem...
Do you have any potential solutions to that? It seems to all get very complicated with P2P and the speed / reliability issues that come with it, unless I'm missing something?
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It's not peer to peer but it can be used in a much more decentralized way than how people tend to use it. Rooms aren't tied to a specific server and it isn't a better experience talking to people on the same server beyond latency. Hosting a server with few users isn't demanding.
It's nice to at least have the option of self-hosting and still being part of the same network, even if you don't leverage it. The ability to not use matrix.org and a dozen other major servers has a lot of meaning even if most people use matrix.org, etc.
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Simply having a dozen major servers is a huge improvement over having a single one too. Peer-to-peer isn't necessarily going to turn out well. The federated model already has serious problems with how it enables abuse. It's a reasonable compromise. Not great, but it seems okay.
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