Hacker News Reader

Comment by teleclimber | Hacker News Reader

The author claims winners and losers but doesn't talk about the criteria for winning and losing. Decentralized networks aren't after the same things as centralized ones. They're not after engagement metrics, ARPU, or stock valuation.

If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the decentralized networks are far behind. But these things can change quickly after changing slowly.

If decentralized networks cause big centralized ones to change their behavior in meaningful ways, for fear of losing users to the decentralized ones, then I would argue that's a win for decentralized networks. Small win, but still a win.

View on HN

> If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the decentralized networks are far behind.

7B humans are organized in decentralized social networks (linked by small world phenomenon). 99% active daily.

Actually, they're on Facebook.

At best, 2B of them are.

There's only 3 billion internet users.

>There's only 3 billion internet users.

I am actually assuming you meant "Social Media Users" and not Internet users. There are now more than 4B internet users.

I was wondering when this was going to happen. A repeat of when people thought www = Internet.

Being on Facebook is not the same thing as being active on it.

I'm sorry you're about to have a big death event. I just saw an article posted on here about it. I feel bad for the fishies.

>If the criteria is number of engaged human users, then for sure the decentralized networks are far behind. But these things can change quickly after changing slowly.

Well, if and when they change, we can write another article about how "decentralized is winning".

For now, they don't change, not even slowly. If anything, they change in the opposite direction (centralized networks getting more users).

the are gauging the consumer experience

which is of course, a mistake

just like you, I don't know what the criteria for this comparison actually would be

> They're not after engagement metrics, ARPU, or stock valuation.

You’re also not defining a winning criteria. What are they after? And who are the big winners?

> What are they after?

Safety, freedom, control, privacy.

> And who are the big winners?

Nobody cares who the "big winners" are. That's the point.

Well, I care.

I'd rather we had decentralized networks for social media, blogging, sharing, content distribution like video, etc.

But we don't.

I can start one of these up (or join one) where it's just me and a handful of other like-minded people in favor of decentralization, but it would defeat the purpose.

I don't merely want a decentralized service, I want a STRONG decentralized service, with tons of nodes and tons of millions of users.

Without that, the "safety, freedom, control, privacy" in today's decentralized services are irrelevant. Being able to do nothing much and having it be safe, totally controllable, and private, is nothing to write home about.

I think we're getting there. I'm hoping one of the federation protocols becomes widely accepted & implemented, so that users from any social platform are able to communicate and cross-post to any other social platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

This reminds me way too much about the IM situation in the late 90s/early 2000. We somehow forgot about that problem because everybody having Facebook kinda solved it for a while.

It feels we are back to square one, but now with massive privacy issues added to the whole problem.

>I don't merely want a decentralized service, I want a STRONG decentralized service, with tons of nodes and tons of millions of users.

This I have hope for matrix.org

you don't know millions of people. you honestly can't. today's decentralized services are pretty decent, i'm in the process of transitioning my family (and extended family) to a handful of servies that i host. we've already successfully replaced facebook messenger with matrix and i've been asked about other things that i could host for the family.

that's my core social network right there and i can host them on activitypub services that all talk to each other. they can even connect to other groups online if they like.

you're looking for this giant thing that doesn't even matter. your social network isn't that large.

If you define winning as safety, freedom, control, privacy, then I'd define the "big winners" as those who have made an impact by those metrics.

If nobody has been impactful in those areas, there's a problem. That's the point.

Citation needed for like everything in your first and last paragraph.

What nonsense. The claim is that the article does not define certain criteria and then goes on to list a bunch of stuff that is reasonably obvious.

Citations are required at the end of scientific papers, they are not required for stating uncontroversial or obvious things in comments on a forum.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com