Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

> I publish ... it's completely decentralized

What do you mean by decentralized in this context?

I think they're saying they have a mailing list set up for communication between friends, and it's "decentralised" in the same way email is (rather, it's federated).

@revx wrote: responses come back straight to me, so there's no fighting in the comments

This makes it sound like revx is the single point of failure.

The whole thing reads to me like the locus of centralisation lies entirely with revx.

I get that email is decentralised / federated.

I imagine that the mailing list is Bcc:, with themself as the To:. This would allow for such a setup. Of course this isn't "socially decentralised" but I doubt that's what most people are referring to when they talk about decentralisation.

An author posting original content is always a single point of failure. That's a problem based in the physical world and has nothing to do with the computer-based system by which they distribute their content.

If revx email host gets shutdown, he can find a new one easy peasy. revx can just update his domain's DNS records to point them to a new server.

The federated nature of email prevents any individual email host from being a single point of failure, which I would believe is the point when comparing publishing via email to publishing content via a social network platform.

Yeah, I probably used the wrong word. I meant that the mechanism of publishing/consuming isn't centralized globally - anyone publishing a newsletter can choose (or build) their publisher, while publishing an instagram post would necessarily be produced and consumed via instagram.

Right yeah, true. Also, I probably wasn't adhering to the HN guideline please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]

My bad, sorry about that.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No problem. Thanks for the apology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com