Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system?

One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of things.

> The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.

The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation, removing the right to leave, effectively centralizing it under federal control) when the country was founded.

(Edit: I reversed the terms confederation and federation here, but what I mean is that the founding of the US removed sovereignty from the states.)

This is where the rubber meets the road: any decentralized system will need to be able to answer the question "how do we [the govt, usually] forcibly remove content from the network?" The way you answer that question will be the way the network centralizes.

The history of true confederations (Colonial States, Personal Computing, the Internet) is that they are temporary chaotic moments before we revert back to the mean of centralization (United States, SaaS/FB/Gmail/centralized communication and iphones as tracking devices, PRISM).

This is all an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law. Our culture is not confederated, and so we wont be able to build scalable confederated systems within it.

> The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation

You have it backwards. The USA was a Confederation (a weak alliance of almost entirely independent nations) under the Articles of Confederation, 1776-1789

Then in 1789 it became a Federation (a strong national union of autonomous but not independent states) with the new Constitution.

In a confederation, the central government has negligible power and states can come and go as they please. The EU is arguably a confederation, and it's pretty much the only modern example, because confederations rarely last long. Historical confederations include the CSA and Holy Roman Empire.

That is not the model that the Fediverse wants to uphold (otherwise it would be called the confediverse). Mastodon is intended to be structured as a Federation, like the United States, Germany, or Malaysia, with a strong but limited central power that maintains unity among the federated members, while mostly letting them do their own thing.

Sorry yeah, I reversed the terms, in response to this:

> The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.

which is not true, under a federation the members do not maintain sovereignty, and this is the important point. The Colonial States gave up their sovereignty when they became federated.

Everything else, besides the terms reversal (my bad), it seems we agree on?

> The EU is arguably a confederation, and it's pretty much the only modern example, because confederations rarely last long.

Exactly!

> That is not the model that the Fediverse wants to uphold

So what are we even arguing about here? We agree decentralization wont last long. If you're using the US as an example of a desirable "light hand" federation I guess that's just where we agree to disagree.

> One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of things.

It's worth teasing this apart.

There is a befuddling belief on the part of some decentralization advocates -- and of some decentralization detractors! -- that decentralization must imply an even distribution of power or influence.

That strikes me as unrealistic in the extreme; meaningful networked ecosystems essentially never converge to uniform distribution. Power laws are the norm, not the exception.

I try to avoid "decentralized"'s linguistic baggage by using the term "federated" instead. Email is federated; Gmail is its behemoth... and that's okay.

(As for Mastodon: today, the majority of the network's traffic resides on the largest 5 of 3500+ publicly announced instances. It's power laws all the way down.)

> There is a befuddling belief on the part of some decentralization advocates -- and of some decentralization detractors! -- that decentralization must imply an even distribution of power or influence.

No, it's that if you observe that power laws are the norm, as you stated, then you start to see decentralization as a process, not a state of being. The idea that a network (or governance structure) "is decentralized by design" makes no sense. If you know decentralization is temporary, it's hard to take Mastodon etc. seriously.

Alas, I don't quite understand the point you're trying to make (and I'd like to!)

Perhaps this will clarify things: I think "decentralized by design" is linguistically ambiguous, because "decentralized" has a bunch of odd baggage -- do you think it's reasonable to say that email is "decentralized by design", and why (or why not)?

Sorry, I'll attempt to clarify: most human networks obey power laws in terms of centralization. For instance, the vast majority of the content is produced by a tiny minority.

Sometimes humans make networks in which this is no longer true, that is content is produced basically equally among all, or at least most, members of the network. These are decentralized networks.

These types of networks are not sustainable or large for a broad host of reasons, and so they form only temporarily. But they are desirable, and valuable, which is why they still form at all.

Email exists well within our very centralized federated political and cultural system, and so no, it is not meaningfully decentralized. We do have some small, decentralized networks (artist communes, maybe qualify?) within the US, but they do not scale. Mastodon will also fall prey to the same issues: as soon as it is big enough for anyone to care about, regulation will come, and regulation will require significant centralization.

Got it, thanks.

I'm fully in agreement with you on this, given that you take "decentralized" to imply "uniform (or nearly uniform) distribution of power/influence".

As an aside, this exemplifies why I tend to avoid the term "decentralized" in the current context: not everyone makes the assumption of uniformity when they read this word.

As a double aside, in case you haven't run across it, I highly recommend this book: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

That's just out-of-scope of the tool in question (Mastodon). Any tool is helpless against Human control. If that is the case the I think I know what you mean by "not meaningfully decentralized".

BUT, if we can at least break the monopoly of FB and Twitter into at least a hexapoly, then that has still meaning. The internet's design allowed for many to use it meaningfully decentralized for many years.

Also, BitTorrent got lots of gov't regulation, but I can still use it since I'm outside the west. And rutrackerDOTorg is so good. I think that is meaningful.

The long-term solution for this Human problem -I believe is to for employees to own corporations. Gov't is corruptible by private companies that is run by modern feudal lords called Executives. The larger the domain of these companies, the more influence it can do to the Gov't. And we have now reach a point in history that these Modern Feudal Lords has acquired all their competitions (Oracle, Disney, that rich dirty old man who owns all new corporations, Bezos, etc.) and is ready to reincarnate Hitler but with orange skin.

And by employees owning corporations. I mean 1-person-1-vote, instead of 1-share-1-vote. Managers and CEOs can still exist, but is not permanent. Employee-owners can recall them anytime, and they can agree for a quarterly or semi-annual evaluation. Employee-owners also decide how much to pay Managers and CEOs, how to use the profit. You may ask if this company can survive? This has been done in large scale by Mondragon, a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. Not perfect but it has done good progress.

> The long-term solution for this Human problem -I believe is to for employees to own corporations.

We're right back to confederation. No one wants to deal with this shit otherwise they already would, hence federation instead.

> And by employees owning corporations. I mean 1-person-1-vote, instead of 1-share-1-vote. Managers and CEOs can still exist, but is not permanent. Employee-owners can recall them anytime, and they can agree for a quarterly or semi-annual evaluation. Employee-owners also decide how much to pay Managers and CEOs, how to use the profit. You may ask if this company can survive? This has been done in large scale by Mondragon, a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. Not perfect but it has done good progress.

No one would ever agree to this except employees. Mondragon works because it pays basically what would be paid regardless. The actual executives managing the Mondragon foundation are not constrained to the same pay structures that the people working in the coops are. The number of non-owning employees is also growing fairly rapidly.

> No one would ever agree to this except employees.

Which is practically 99.999% of the world. Ever heard of the top 100 billionaires having control of most of the world?

> Email exists well within our very centralized federated political and cultural system, and so no, it is not meaningfully decentralized.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this, especially since you go on to say that artist communes in the US qualify. Surely these artist communes exist within our centralized political and cultural system as well? These communes presumably refer crimes such as murder to the centralized authority, the police, rather than lynch mob.

I actually suspect that any significant regulation of Mastodon would in fact increase decentralization. Since the software itself is open source, it will be hard to regulate, if not impossible (is code speech?). That means regulators have to go after hosts of instances. Perhaps some instances will comply with regulation, but I suspect many will not. The largest of the non-complying instances will be shut down.

If the complying instances are seen as inferior to non-complying instances, instead of flocking to the complying instances, the users of the instances that were shut down should distribute themselves amongst the remaining non-compliant instances. Some of these instances will be outside of the centralized authority's jurisdiction (for example, after SESTA, many sex workers flocked to a mastodon instance that was specifically set up for them; this instance is hosted outside the jurisdiction of the US).

> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this, especially since you go on to say that artist communes in the US qualify. Surely these artist communes exist within our centralized political and cultural system as well? These communes presumably refer crimes such as murder to the centralized authority, the police, rather than lynch mob.

Yes, that's definitely true. There's a no true scotsman element to this, I know. What I meant by that was that the artist communes were meaningfully decentralized in terms of individuals artistic contributions (even then, only some of them are), not entirely, politically etc. I would still argue that they can be more "meaningfully" decentralized than email based on how much easier it is for the government to control email than physical space, but this stuff is difficult to discuss without lossy abstractions as you've pointed out.

> I actually suspect that any significant regulation of Mastodon would in fact increase decentralization. Since the software itself is open source, it will be hard to regulate, if not impossible (is code speech?). That means regulators have to go after hosts of instances. Perhaps some instances will comply with regulation, but I suspect many will not. The largest of the non-complying instances will be shut down.

This is true, but only until physical server location becomes the relevant attribute for jurisdiction. Mastodon instances within the US will be hosted on AWS, Azure etc., and will have no choice but to comply with regulations.

> Some of these instances will be outside of the centralized authority's jurisdiction (for example, after SESTA, many sex workers flocked to a mastodon instance that was specifically set up for them; this instance is hosted outside the jurisdiction of the US).

I keep seeing this pointed out, but I don't think it's a positive. Not only are you still aggregating vulnerable people on a service not designed for secure communications, that can certainly be surveilled by US law enforcement even if it can't be shut down, you're also increasing the incentive for the government to regulate the international internet.

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