If you want to generate interesting questions about decentralization, just stare at how modern BitTorrent works and try to explain why the tech/ecosystem are the way they are. I'm still struggling to construct a full narrative
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John Backus Retweeted John Backus
I have a narrative I like now, but here are a few example questions I'm still not super confident about: • Why didn't anonymous file sharing via I2P take off? • Why didn't DHT+PEX fully replace centralized trackers? • Why is search *still* centralized?https://twitter.com/backus/status/1018953426355433472 …
John Backus added,
John Backus @backusDecentralization enthusiasts: Why didn't decentralized BitTorrent search takeoff? Many tried: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BitTorrent&oldid=850160168#Decentralized_keyword_search … Not rhetorical, I'd love ideas. I'll share a few theories below
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Replying to @backus
The decentralized search experience was never particularly good. Tribler took forever to load, there weren't many total results, and results had little information- and weren't particularly high quality (a lot of broken results)
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Replying to @CharlesElegans
I think I agree, but I haven't used them all. For example, Perfect Dark's "DKT" + DHT combo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(P2P)#DKT+DHT+DU …. Also, techniques which scrape the DHT locally then create a fast local index. OpenBay also may fit I think https://github.com/isohuntto/openbay …. BTDigg also a partial fit
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Replying to @backus @CharlesElegans
I think the claim that decentralized search was just a worse experience is a decent default assumption if for no other reason than creating a good decentralized UX seems to be an order of magnitude harder than an equivalent centralized system.
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Replying to @backus
Distributed systems throw out a lot of the assumptions that make for good user experiences- e.g. you don't have a bounded amount of time before seeing search results, so things have to trickle in out of order.
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Yup. I also think it that completing 80% (as in 80/20 rule) of a product for a centralized app is pretty usable on avg, maybe a bit buggy. 80% for a decentralized app is mainly spent on getting it to work securely and the UI doesn't get enough attention (Tribler may be a good ex)
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