The Centralized Internet Is Inevitable | Hacker News Reader

The Centralized Internet Is Inevitable

palladiummag.com

192 pointsundefined1200 comments

Well, the author is talking about the "mainstream internet" that most people think of: we used to have to point out that the internet wasn't the same thing as the world wide web, now we have to point out that it isn't the same thing as facebook, twitter and amazon. There's nothing inevitable about a centralized internet technologically: packet-switched networking is by it's nature decentralized. However, my pipe dream of someday seeing a truly decentralized mesh network that nobody can ever control or censor gets less hopeful every day - not because it's technically infeasible, but because it would require more people to get on board than I believe people have the will for.

Indeed. There are dozens if not hundreds of people consistently working on decentralized tools that fit the current laws/social climate. Not even China can fully centralize the actual internet, so what hope does anyone else?

China doesn't have to control/centralize all of the internet - just enough that the vast majority of people cannot access content that cannot be policed. VPNs still very much work and are used by tech savvy there - but they are effectively useless for most people, thereby just making them not attractive.

VPNs are the dumb persons idea of a secure internet. You've just sold all your secrets to a third party.

Tor is a slightly better solution, but again, not by much. You're hoping that a randomly chosen VPN will not have an interest in what you're looking at and that the two VPNs behind it are owned by someone else so they can't correlate the metadata.

I know. I've never advocated for using VPN providers as a valid way to get Internet privacy.

All good, it's just that I've heard too many people suggest VPN as this magic bullet that solve all our problems.

In my experience VPNs are used by everyone I’ve interacted with, including very tech unsavvy users.

It isn't clear to me that we've got a good technical, never mind social solution, to the problem of anonymous actors.

I suspect that "be careful what you wish for" is applicable to the idea of a communication medium that "nobody can ever control or censor". We already have numerous problems caused by anonymity with our existing infrastructure (DDOS, ransomware, threats, defamation, etc.).

I think neither extreme, a completely anonymous infrastructure or a completely non-anonymous infrastructure, is desirable.

I think Urbit's approach here is actually pretty good.

Pseudonymous IDs that have a small, but non-zero cost.

Your reputation is tied to the ID and the economics don't allow spinning up millions of them to spam people.

They're building a from the feet up first principles approach to really solving the centralization incentive issues of the modern web and operating systems.

It's super ambitious, but I think it's pretty cool (and it's not vaporware, the current stuff actually works - it's just early on).

A lot of the other attempts at decentralized systems can't fix the server/client model or the spam problem - all which push users back to centralized services.

https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/

Email spam could be almost totally eliminated if you had to send someone a 1-24c micro transaction for them to receive your mail.

Over the course of a year the costs to send would be balanced by the profit from receiving for your average person but for spammers it would be untenable.

Is email SPAM really a serious problem today? (Unless by SPAM you refer to marketing emails of various sorts that you agreed to in some manner and that provide an unsubscribe link.) Sure. Charging for emails would cut down on the volume some--and would eliminate the email that's occasionally interesting but I don't routinely read--but would also marginalize the use of non-commercial email for those with little money.

It's only not a problem because centralized megacorps solved it and everyone has to use them because of the spam problem.

If you're trying to come up with a model that isn't using centralized companies to solve the problem for you then it's still a problem.

Part of the incentive towards centralization is because the spam problem is hard to solve in a decentralized way with the modern web.

I've wondered how much spam filters actually cost in terms of compute resources and electricity.

I bet it's a lot. I bet there has to be a better way.

One tool I use is called greylog for postfix. Effective for me.

Totally fair. Though the only way to solve spam control in a decentralized way is probably to put in a system that no one will actually use.

> It's only not a problem because centralized megacorps solved it and everyone has to use them because of the spam problem.

Is this a perception or do you have data on this?

See my response to parent. Email spam from the point of view of self-hosted infrastructure is no longer a problem in my experience. No megacorps needed (or wanted, IMO).

The problem I had, when I tried to de-megacorp my e-mail, was with knowing whether the e-mails I sent got reliably delivered.

I set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, used an IP not on any blacklists, and so on - everything guides told me I ought to do. Still, not only would my test messages often go to spam, I'm pretty sure I saw some vanish entirely, not even making it to the spam folder.

And this is a very insidious problem - did I e-mail X and they just didn't deign to reply? Or did my message never reach them?

I wish there was a 1-step process for white-listing known good emails, for a single address, or a single domain, or a list of either.

I also wish there was a process for exporting/importing these lists.

With SPF/DKIM/DMARC (whichever of those verifies that the email header was actually set by someone who has access to that email sending address) on and open-relay on STMP turned off, I envision a web-of-trust-lite world (which is probably the wheel I'm reinventing) where I and everyone I exchange email-address-trust-cards like business cards help to crowdsource what is and is not spam based on shared whitelists and degree-of-separation weighting. If I think something is spam, my 1st degree of separation (who has handshaked with me to verify that yes we've met) also probably does, but his colleague, maybe not.

MUAs and online email service providers would check the compiled whitelist for each account before running their own spam filtering.

We have good online adblock lists, can we do the same for email spamlists without 27 clicks to whitelist or blacklist emails?

Servers would have to not blackhole spam-tripping emails and reply with 'you spam = bad', that is another problem entirely.

Personal anecdote: I wrote my own email server; it has no spam blocking of any kind other than checking the Spamhaus blacklist. That gets me down to a spam message every few days at most.

> Is email SPAM really a serious problem today?

Spam in email is basically not a problem anymore, in my experience.

~15 years I would get literally thousands of spam emails per day in my spam folder. But this was the days when email servers were configured to accept anything no matter how malformed. And many people had misconfigured smtp clients, thus attempting to enforce constraints would drop a lot of legitimate mail. So spam was a huge problem.

Today it's very different. I no longer see any smtp clients from legitimate senders with any protocol misconfiguration. So for years now I enforce every detail at the smtp connection level (with postfix), before the email is accepted.

I still see failed attempts in the postfix logs but they get blocked right there. Actual spam getting through to the spam filter is down to a few a week.

Then checking DKIM drops all of these in the spam folder.

Spam that gets through these steps to my actual inbox is now so rare that it's always a surprise. Less than ten a year, tops.

So from my perspective (running my own email infrastructure for a handful of domains, personal and business, friends and family) email spam is no longer a concern.

I like the idea but it does seem like you're setting up a poll tax to participate fully in the internet, simultaneously having it high enough to deter or at least raise the bar on scams and low enough to be affordable to the whole world is a hard ask.

They have free IDs too, but groups can block them to reduce spam.

The free IDs have some other negatives too I think (long names, harder to recover, etc.).

The price is quite low ~$10 for a 'planet' or standard ID. Maybe in the developing world that price is too high, but I'd suspect if it succeeded to the point where that was an issue it could be solved without too much trouble.

The ID solution is cool because it fixes the spam issue which is one of the core incentives behind centralization.

The other core reason to centralize is server management and finding other users. If you design an OS that has this bit baked into it from the start you can make this complexity invisible to the user. You can have apps be p2p by default without the user having to know about it, you can make it easy for users to send photos or messages directly to each other rather than always having to interoperate with a middleman company (FB, Google etc.).

Their approach of starting as a VM that runs in linux is a good idea, it allows iteration on something that's immediately usable. Their initial focus on chat too I think is smart - it gets people using it while they improve it and immediately seeing changes.

Long term goal would be getting urbit running on its own hardware without the virtual layer, but I think if they started trying to do that they wouldn't succeed. With the current approach they might.

> I like the idea but it does seem like you're setting up a poll tax to participate fully in the internet, simultaneously having it high enough to deter or at least raise the bar on scams and low enough to be affordable to the whole world is a hard ask.

It's not actually that hard, because ordinary users can generate one ID and use it for many years, but spammers have to generate a new ID every five minutes because they immediately get blocked and have all content associated with the blocked IDs get retroactively dumped in the spam folder. So the cost to spammers is literally a million times higher than it is for ordinary users, which is exactly the sort of thing that actually works.

> So the cost to spammers is literally a million times higher than it is for ordinary users, which is exactly the sort of thing that actually works.

The law-abiding user is the one that incurs the real cost. Spammers pump and dump millions of IDs. This drives up the cost of getting an ID. The normal user that just needs a new ID for some reason is the one that suffers the most here.

I don't care if it's expensive for a scammer. If it's cost-prohibitive for grandma to get a new ID, then it defeats the purpose.

It's still important to think about how much $10, the current Urbit ID price, represents in some parts of the world. The World Bank has a poverty line of ~$3-4 per day and over half of India lives (or did in 2017) on less than that and the official rural poverty line is around $6-7 a month. If we're setting up the next internet we really shouldn't be locking out anyone due to price.

Even for someone living on $3/day, paying $10 once every ten years represents 0.09% of their income. You could also plausibly impose alternative costs, like making someone solve captchas for an hour. Then people in rich countries pay $10, people in poor countries spend an hour (which to them is significantly less than $10 of their time).

that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american - a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits

I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique

> that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american

Which would be $50-$100/year, i.e. still not very much.

Recall that it costs significantly more than that to have internet access.

> a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits

The obvious benefit being that you get to be in the same network as the people in rich countries, and that network is not overrun by spam or controlled by a multinational conglomerate that uses its ownership of the means of communication to cost you significantly more than $10.

> I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique

What do you do with new IDs that have no reputation? If they can't post they can't earn a reputation, if they can post they can spam.

Urbit is interesting, but this troubles me:

> there are only 2^32 (~4B) Urbit IDs, so they cost something.

> Ultimately, we want your Urbit ID to feel like a civilizational key. If your Urbit ID were a piece of hardware, you could tap it to unlock a door, swipe it to buy a coffee, and plug it into any computer to log in. Your Urbit ID should be a unique, beautiful object that’s both an address and a wallet. It’s a key to a secret club and the ticket to your digital life.

So I guess almost half the current global population is excluded from civilization?

They talk about that - if they're approaching the limit they'd make changes to produce more IDs.

The network has a built in governing body that can do things like that (and they would since restricting access isn't the goal).

But if the number of available Urbit IDs can be scaled up and down on an as-needed basis, why did they start with 4B and not, for example, 1M?

32-bits is just a convenient round number to wrap everything around.

Apparently it's taken us ~30 years to come close[1] to this number of users on the current internet. Seems like not an issue for a very long time, and if it becomes one, it can be amended.

That said, anyone can get on Urbit for free as a comet. The only real limitations on comets are social in nature—not technological.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

It's actually really easy: force people to pay per packet. The problem is that we don't have any global system that has solved fast micro-transactions at a global scale without the concept of a permanent identity.

At the dumbest level forums would look much different to what they do today if every post cost you $1 and every downvote $0.25.

> DDOS, ransomware, threats, defamation, etc

These problems are not caused by anonymity. DDoS and ransomware are problems that have their roots in poor security of consumer operating systems. Very few DDoS participants or ransomware victims are willing to be such. Threats and defamation are often done by people literally posting on social media accounts with their names and personal details.

>my pipe dream of someday seeing a truly decentralized mesh network that nobody can ever control or censor

Sounds like i2p: https://geti2p.net, except it's done on top of the Internet (but would also work on a mesh network).

That, or Freenet. Or Tor. None of which ever really took off - mostly due to user apathy rather than technical feasibility. Sadly.

Apathy is a symptom of lack of immediate value. Torrents and p2p went mainstream when dinosaur content distributors failed to provide service that people wanted. That turned into streaming services which made bank because they addressed the need for on demand entertainment. Centralized media publishers like Facebook and Twitter are now the dinosaurs. Create a news service that fulfills the need for unfiltered on demand reporting and you can be it. Look at the streamers that are beginning to do this. Give them a platform that can’t be censored and allows people to subscribe and donate to them. Figure out the video storage and delivery problem. The world needs you.

Have you heard of Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun's project Ceptr/Holographic-chain? They have developed a distributed p2p data integrity engine that enables agents to bootstrap new distributed apps as fast as the Ruby on Rails framework:

"Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications.

Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip."

Essentially, the tradeoffs don't make it worthwhile for the average user: having to do more work to interoperate with fewer people? "Sign me up," says almost nobody.

And specifically, few people want to join services that are mostly populated by people who got kicked off of other services.

Deplatforming from the big services helps create a moat around them by creating a huge population of obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers who will descend upon any newer or smaller challenger like those clouds of moose killing black flies up North.

Look at BitChute and other small video sites now that YouTube has been deplatforming trolls and crazies. They are full of toxic waste. BitChute now gets called “poopchute.”

>Deplatforming from the big services helps create a moat around them by creating a huge population of obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers who will descend upon any newer or smaller challenger like those clouds of moose killing black flies up North.

In many cases these smaller sites were created specifically to cater to those "obnoxious trolls, crackpots, and hate mongers" as a "free speech/censorship resistant" alternative to the mainstream. BitChute's selling point is serving content which would be banned on YouTube - obviously that's what they get. If they or similar sites are victims of anything, it's their own success.

That doesn't invalidate the point though. You can be entirely ethical in the goals of your platform, as well as have a legitimately ethical audience you hope to cater to and still run into the problem pointed out.

The only argument you need to make for a competitor to make sense is "<Platform X> isn't perfect." That's accurate for all of them. A good competitor will have all the same challenges a 'bad' competitor would.

> They are full of toxic waste.

4chan is considered toxic waste. Old Youtube was full of toxic. Old Tumblr was toxic waste.

Those are / were home to the most creative communities.

Now? New centralized media is starting to look a lot like old media: standardized, no spice, boring. Perfect for a protestant society.

Old 4chan, YouTube, and Tumblr were not full of neo-Nazi propaganda unless you count ironic jokes that were obviously jokes, so no. Then the great Basement Blitzkreig of the 20-teens happened.

Were they obviously jokes? Because in hindsight, a lot of that behavior looks like it was really clandestine signaling allowing neo-Nazis to find each other

>in hindsight, a lot of that behavior looks like it was really clandestine signaling allowing neo-Nazis to find each other.

Of course it was. The premise that racists wouldn't take advantage of communities which let them communicate openly and gave them the plausible deniability of "irony" while doing so is absurd. Why wouldn't they, when the community "mocks" them by acting just like them, reinforcing their beliefs, spreading their gospel and making them feel as at home as possible?

I mean, it's not exactly a scathing rebuke, is it?

Actually, I am working on a technology to do exactly this. With the increased trust that comes from extreme privacy, simplified permissions management, and a new security model users can comfortably do things that aren’t available on the WWW.

When you continue to think in terms of social media where a centralized service extracts user data as a blunt financial weapon from a massive user count then decentralization doesn’t make any sense. When you turn this around to solving more practical problems the applications and revenue model change.

Nobody perceives existing service in such terms except for HN geek crowd. An average person doesn't even have a concept of online privacy internalized, for him worrying about online privacy is basically the same as worrying about TSA agent examining his vacation backpack: he has nothing to hide. But it's even worse, since airport examinations happen in physical world and they cause at least some inconvenience, whilst FAANGs harvesting your data is invisible and only brings more comfort.

Advertising something with better privacy, permission, etc. will only bring you people that already care about it, i.e. the same 0.01% of geeks. I can see only two ways to achieve the goal of decentralized and privacy-respecting "Internet":

- Convince people that privacy is important. A very hard task in our age for several reasons. Also, it needs to be supported by legislation.

- Make the services more convenient to use than existing ones. Arguably impossible due to manpower imbalance and technical issues (privacy and security almost always come at a price of convenience).

> An average person doesn't even have a...

An average person has whatever perception the market and product communicate. If you are banking on perception alone the current approach is good enough. The only way to push through that is to provide new capabilities or solutions to old problems other approaches refuse to provide.

You aren't selling privacy. You are selling a product with privacy included.

Yes, this is what I'm saying. So in this this case you're trying to make a product that is both superior in terms of convenience, features and price AND has privacy included. If you manage to do that, then yes, there is a chance. It's just that it's extremely hard to outperform current incumbents given that you're setting yourself very serious constraints, both technical and ethical, compared to them. Not to mention the budget.

At various points in time 0.01% could be said about computers, Internet, Web, Ad blocking, 3rd party cookies. Pioneers pave the way.

interoperating with fewer people means that the quality of the people (for those operations at least) can be increased.

> interoperate with fewer people

Quality, not quantity... ;)

If those people end up being less like the average person on social media, that could be a good proposition

I don't use social media (facebook, twitter, linkeding) because of the kind of people on it - but I do follow a series of website of interesting people.

Hacker news is somewhere in between. The content is half twitter / half interesting.

You can't just replace. You need to make a better game than what is provided.

The most difficult aspect of this is it is hard to compete against free.

Given that the internet relies on physical medium to travel you will sadly require actual anarchism before you can achieve digital anarchism.

Or, more likely, cooperatives. Apply the same anarchist logic to power and it breeds lethality, but I know local power coops work pretty well IME.

Torrents seem to match your definition pretty well. And it's a quite successfull technology.

>nobody can ever control or censor gets less hopeful every day

Any communication medium that isn't controlled or censored will break under a deluge of spam.

We see that a lot in practice, but it's not clear that there aren't solutions.

For example, if it costs someone $0.00001 to send you a packet, that could still be decentralized but the economics change a lot. Maybe for the better.

There is no solution which isn't equivalent to censorship, because "spam" is just a category of speech.

But then spammers just send like they usually do, by exploiting somebody's insecure setup and using their resources.

If being exploited in that way was more expensive, it might happen less often.

Not true. I've been thinking about this problem for a while and there is a solution: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...

Thank you for this fascinating write-up. It's given me a lot to think about. I'm quite curious as to why no existing social networks have tried to implement your ideas in a meaningful way, and to a lesser extent why no new start-ups have.

Perhaps when I have a few hundred million to invest in a better platform I'll reach out! (One can dream).

This is still centralized. You have 1 place that stores the trust ratings. The fact that it crowd sources the ratings doesn't change that it's centralized.

It also doesn't really work. You have to choose between not gettimg messages from those outside your circle of trust or getting spammed.

Weird, that hasn't happened to the ones I've been on for years.

If someone tried to build an app on one of those systems where you were forced to accept messages by default until you blacklisted them then it probably would. It would be terrible.

Thankfully no users actually want apps like that, we've already got email and web social media sites for having a public directory of strangers to contact. That is a use-case that is only sometimes needed, and when it is you only need to use it once.

You can ban obvious spam and not censor the rest. So yes, you'd get some of the spam, but at least you wouldn't be censoring the rest. But you'd still need _some_ form of control, of course

What it would take is for us all to set up nodes. I'd do it, if anyone else would: tragedy of the commons. At least ham radio guys are doing it.

Set this up: https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-a-longdis...

I'm game.

You are a hero. Thanks for the link.

This domain always returns HTTP status code 418 in my locale...

i used to be part of a decentralized mesh network. I see that part as less likely each year.

Things centralize, then when the central node gets corrupted, everything is perturbed for a while and somewhat decentralized, until the next centralization begins. Same as disruption theory.

Network effects apply to centralized networks moreso than to decentralized effects. Cost to add a new node to a decentralized network generally remains higher than onboarding a new customer to a centralized network. And that kills it over time.

(Consider for example that the "new node" may be malicious... a decentralized network needs a lot of duplication of effort to fight malicious actors, a central network can do this cheaper over time.)

Even git, built on the very idea of decentralization, centralizes onto github and gets a lot of value out of that.

What if there was a simpler way?

Is the Internet itself leading to more freedom or less? Or is it human nature spilling into bits and functions that is?

>Is the Internet itself leading to more freedom or less? Or is it human nature spilling into bits and functions that is?

The funny thing is, the internet is big enough and complex enough that all of these are true.

Even the relatively restricted freedom of social media, itself just a part of the greater internet, is greater than the freedom people had to broadcast their views and communicate with a worldwide audience prior to the internet, which is almost zero.

Even if you had a mesh network, global low-latency communication requires undersea cables, and regional high-bandwidth hubs. Besides the undersea cables, local hub-and-spoke networks are needed to provide low-latency regional communication.

Centralization of network infrastructure is shaped by the physics and capital costs of communication technology.

Scuttlebutt [1] is the Decentralized Mesh you're looking for. Still early stages but will only improve over time. Has a few thousand users (approx, it's a mesh after all), and is developed completely in the open with clients written in multiple languages.

It can't be censored or shut down because all communication spreads through peers, with few central points that can be blocked.

1. https://scuttlebutt.nz

As a schoolboy, I had friends whose parents consciously didn't bring broadcast TV into their house. They did have a vcr. They didn't want TV.

You won't reach Carol Couchpotato, but there will always be a core of people willing to living outside the FAANG coral.

If you care about the decentral internet, set yourself realistic expectations. Work with the coalition of the willing. Make it as welcoming as you can. It'll be fun times!

I really like this point. What really matters is your experience, your connections, and your contributions. What everyone else has done has usually been a herd mentality, now is no different, but being able to carve out a little space of your own with those who want that as well--- that is more possible today than it ever has been. In a way, we are in a golden age of being able to do it. Be the change you want to see in the internet.

Almost all Internet users have an organization between them and the people they would communicate with. Hell, your registrar can punt you for your content, which means that it's a vanishingly small number of people, those on the dark web and a few other places, who have access to a truly decentralized internet.

The phase transition takes place when open infrastructure, bandwidth and compute capacity together reach a critical threshold; new ICs will emerge through virtual infrastructure and resource sharing.

If you read Tim Woo's master switch you will get everything is designed to be centralised. Internet is designed to be centralised.

The bottom line is that the infrastructure (the cable and the cell towers are centralised). Until we can legally encrypt over Ham radio and quality peer reviewed open sourced post-quantum encryption algorithm Internet is centralised!

Your pipe dream is thought of and echoed by many, but the problem I see on an all-too regular basis is that many/most worthy projects never seem to reach critical mass. It's not as if we don't have enough people to make it grow and achieve liftoff - we just seem to lack the impetus to all push at the same time.

One possible parallel is that we have many roads/highways all essentially built and controlled by centralised authorities and this is used not only by law-abiding citizens but also by criminals. By criminals you could also include people that don't have the same ideology as the State.

Depending on the country laws you can or can't do something like FreiFunk

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

Even if countries laws permit it, your Landlord can say no. Because gathering of youth, disturbing residents, and/or businesses. Happened to me.

edit: Funny thing is, landlord/housing society is rolling out their own public wifi access points across their properties now in cooperation with the regional ISP.

Completely agree. Amazing what was unthinkable in the early days and optimism of the net, has been replaced by near dystopia.

It seems that New tech has an advantage over the incumbents when

1) The early population of users is all experts or hackers of some sort (so diversity of use cases is low)

2) the regulators, are in no way or form able to project force, because they simply cannot recruit people as fast as new tech firms.

Eventually, the tech firms start hitting various frontiers, either slowing down, or failing and ejecting workers. New classes of workers catch up, and government projects start getting built.

Once the Frontier advantages disappear - the extra degrees of freedom new firms enjoyed get captured or shared with other powers, and become common place. Unless you find new degrees of freedom (With market/rule disrupting power) are found, the new dominant firms and the old political powers will start acting on each other.

This is where we are. The thought of a centralized net is pretty troubling, especially where it will end up as tech develops. It has only been 20 years since 2000 and web 2.0. There are countries which don't know that Facebook isn't the internet.

Well, it's only a dystopia if you want freedom over prosperity.

Turns out, most people want prosperity and the only reason they actually want freedom is because they're afraid lack of freedom blocks their attempts at prosperity.

The internet doesn't (yet) actually interfere with freedom in this sense, so few people care, and I suspect many of them are on this forum.

You can't have prosperity without freedom. What you're describing is a sure path to slavery; which is inescapable poverty.

The minute you lose all bargaining power, you become a slave.

Employees of corporations who think that less freedom leads to more prosperity may feel protected now but the minute that your master no longer needs your support, you will become one of the victims.

In all of history, people who live in free countries have always had the upper hand over those who live in oppressed countries.

If your country becomes an oppressed country, many of the rich people (the best among them) will leave and they will bring their money along with them to a free country. Most rich people don't want to live in an oppressed country. They simply don't like to see misery. I'm betting on island nations with relatively small populations.

> You can't have prosperity without freedom.

What about China?

They work very hard and they get relatively little for it. I wouldn't call that prosperity yet. Their stock index (SSE Composite Index) hasn't grown at all since 2009. Their GDP growth has been slowing, especially when you consider that they constantly devaluate their own currency (the inflation should make their growth numbers look bigger).

You can point to nice modern cities like Shanghai and assume that China is prosperous, but you can do the same with Pyongyang and assume that North Korea is prosperous.

Besides that, they seem to have been getting freer over time until about 2009 (compared to what they had before)... 2009 is also when the GDP growth rate started to fall.

> Turns out, most people want prosperity and the only reason they actually want freedom is because they're afraid lack of freedom blocks their attempts at prosperity.

Because we are exploring an infinite problem space, there is no algorithmic solution to the question of prosperity. People who forgo freedom essentially are subjecting themselves to someone else's idea of prosperity, and those who want to keep their freedoms are the ones that don't believe anyone else's exploration to find prosperity can necessarily be better than theirs.

> The internet doesn't (yet) actually interfere with freedom in this sense

But it does. Tremendous human potential is already being wasted in the name of showing ads to eyeballs; from PhDs who run the big data experiments, to the general public that waste their energy on outrage and unintegrable squabbles. Our collective intelligence suffers for this, we are less able to make sense of things as natural as pandemics despite the increased connectivity, and hopelessly stuck in argument for more complicated things. It tremendously and collectively blocks out a lot of prosperity, it just does in a way that doesn't show up on quarterly earnings.

Well advertisement is the basis on which many services can be offered... it isn't clear that a small number of PhDs/etc. being employed in (a mostly automated) discipline is therefore "a waste".

How many of these wasted lives have, for example, enabled all of the youtube creators to have careers?

> who forgo freedom essentially are subjecting themselves to someone else's idea of prosperity,

Yes and no. The problem space may be infinite, but human nature isnt; nor is the capacity of any given society to provide prosperity.

At some point your parents have to decide what bets to make on how you can reconsile your nature with the potential opportunities on offer (eg., to encourage sports, music, academic study, etc.).

And when parenting subsides you likewise have to reflect and make the same sorts of decisions.

Each such decision is a foreclosing of freedom in your sense: ie., it throws away much of the problem space.

Freedom is the currency of life, it's not there to be amassessed for its own sake. Happiness/prosperity/etc. can only be obtained by spending it.

> algorithmic solution to the question of prosperity

There kind-of is. Food, water (and air, I guess), housing, energy, protection from violence, sex. Only the last one, where human needs transform for physiological to psychological, lacks an algorithmic solution - and all further needs, like love, meaningful work, life purpose etc., but there's a reason we call these "first world problems". Also, as much as I like to diss it, religion has pretty good answers for these needs as well. Maybe the reason I dismiss religion is, that I can fulfill these needs myself...

Any system that requires all users to be massively above-average is, almost by definition, doomed to a niche existence.

Please read Master Switch by Tim Woo. It is worth noting that most things that are marketed as grass root are designed to be centralised.

I'm finding it rather unlikely that decentralized institutions like blogs, forums (the PHPbb kind, not subreddits), personal websites will disappear as a class. What has been happening is that people have taken the parts of their communication that does not require such tools into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit -- commercial entities that (for perfectly valid commercial reasons) focus on the 80% of communications that they can service with 20% of the work. If these behemoths were really trying to become universal content archives, they'd behave very differently. I don't think they're losing any sleep over the existence of 4chan, Dreamwidth or Simple Machines Forum; it's a different world, and not one they could easily make any money in. They have centralized the internet to the extent that helps making them money and no step further.

I wouldn't be surprised if states start playing this game, but if government IT so far has been any indication, the results won't last long. Most likely, servers in rogue countries will be used for all sufficiently hot potatoes (just as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are operating from Russia but used all over the world), whereas the rest of online activity that doesn't fit well into the big walled gardens will keep happening semi-anonymously as it is now. Governments will probably keep downloading and hoarding everything, but this has been going on for years and everyone just adapted. Downloading is but a first step on the long road to controlling (and, unlike the former, the latter cannot easily be automated). Encryption bans will be undermined in practice by steganography, surveillance by fake data, and censorship by various forms of illegibilization. I'm not saying it will be a great world to live in...

> into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit

I don't think "convenience" explains it.

Take for example talking with the local group of emergency food delivery volunteers. I picked that example because if you really need to talk with them, it's not optional.

I can't avoid Facebook to do that. It's not a convenience issue. The local group is on Facebook, so I have to use Facebook to achieve my task. There isn't a "less convenient" alternative for me to use, if I need to talk to those people as a group.

I could try phoning someone in the group, or emailing. That might get something to happen. But it won't let me achieve the basic task, which is to communicate with a particular group of people, i.e. all of them identified by some common interest. The alternatives will just let me talk to one person who is connected to the group, with a different effect.

Well, that's just my side. But can we say the reason the group is on Facebook is due to convenience for the people who created the group?

It's arguable, but I think probably not any more. Most likely, the group was formed on Facebook because the people forming it were already on Facebook due to similar network effect pressures for other things they got involved in at some time, and for this new group, if they picked a different platform, a lot of people they want to reach wouldn't have the same level of access to the service they aim to provide. The task for them was to pick a platform lots of local people could realistically join. If they had picked some forum on a private domain, or even a mailing list these days, realistically it wouldn't have been as effective for the service they are aiming to provide locally.

So it's network effects over many layers, and I don't think it's accurate to sum that up as convenience any more.

That one's a good example, though I'd still argue that such cases are rare. I'm pretty sure that, at least as a consumer (if not as a volunteer) you could communicate with such a local group through email. Last time I've been asked to join a facebook group, I've said I didn't have an account and everyone switched to a mailing list administered via google in no time. (Though I was not the only one.) Pretty sure a bunch of other alternatives would have been possible if google didn't work nicely. Over the last half-year of online academic events, I've seen at least half a dozen different online services used (Zoom, Zulip, Gather.town, google hangouts, Cisco Webex and probably a bunch I don't remember). Most of us users don't particularly like to, but can (without serious tears) learn a new tool when it comes up and turns out to be more suited.

As it comes to reach, don't forget that email has probably the greatest reach of any service around.

> Last time I've been asked to join a facebook group, I've said I didn't have an account and everyone switched to a mailing list administered via google in no time.

That's amazing. I've seen similar things the other way around. Someone didn't use Facebook. People didn't switch; they got left out and forgotten.

Another one was Google Groups (a type of mailing list). Someone didn't want to use a Google account. They couldn't figure out how to subscribe. Was the group willing to switch to another provider? No of course not. In the end an admin manually subscribed the person with their non-Google address, but if that hadn't been possible, the group would have let them go rather than switch service.

I think it depends on how much the group wants to accommodate everyone who wants to be in it, and what the mix of people is. Also whether it depends on additional tools such as Facebook Events.

If it's a fun social group that you're interested in joining, where the people don't particularly care who is in it, they're probably not going to change what they do. That's fairly obvious when the group aren't your friends (yet). Less obviously, I've seen it happens among friends too, where someone not on Facebook gradually gets left out and forgotten from things like party invitations.

> Over the last half-year of online academic events, I've seen at least half a dozen different online services used (Zoom, Zulip, Gather.town, google hangouts, Cisco Webex and probably a bunch I don't remember). Most of us users don't particularly like to, but can (without serious tears) learn a new tool when it comes up and turns out to be more suited.

I've seen the same thing this summer. (Some of those tools have awful data protection issues and permissions to do things they shouldn't on your computer, yet I've installed and used them anyway. When it's a job interview you don't really have a choice.)

The above list shows us Facebook doesn't have a monopoly. But I don't count them as great examples of freely leaving behind walled gardens either. It's more like, there are more walled gardens. You don't get a choice which tool to use. You must use whatever tool the group has chosen before you join it, and they are very unlikely to change tool for a new joiner.

> As it comes to reach, don't forget that email has probably the greatest reach of any service around.

Yes and no. Everyone uses email, but many only use it inside Gmail, which is a bit of a mess if you're subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists, and trying to keep track of events you've been invited to.

> Some of those tools have awful data protection issues and permissions to do things they shouldn't on your computer, yet I've installed and used them anyway.

It's not like you can say anything different about the big corporate providers... Sure they might protect your data better (against external threats) but the data they do have they are surely abusing as much as they can.

> That's amazing. I've seen similar things the other way around. Someone didn't use Facebook. People didn't switch; they got left out and forgotten.

I probably should have said it was a tech-savvy academic community, and a somewhat small one (ca. 50 people).

> Another one was Google Groups (a type of mailing list). Someone didn't want to use a Google account. They couldn't figure out how to subscribe. Was the group willing to switch to another provider? No of course not. In the end an admin manually subscribed the person with their non-Google address, but if that hadn't been possible, the group would have let them go rather than switch service.

Google groups was what we ended up with, after facebook caused resistance. The thing with google groups is, it's not really a walled garden -- it's just a mailing list; you have all your data archived in your email unless you choose to delete it yourself, and if it fails for whatever reason, you can just manually send an email with a huge Bcc instead. Google in generally is pretty good at "export all your data"; while partly due to antitrust pressure, I think that this is mainly a way to keep the techie audience semi-loyal. I am more worried about github/lab, ironically, due to the "superstructure" they add on top of the repositories (issue trackers mostly). In theory there are tools that can export all of it "back" into the repository, but in practice people are loath to use them.

> Yes and no. Everyone uses email, but many only use it inside Gmail, which is a bit of a mess if you're subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists, and trying to keep track of events you've been invited to.

Anything is a mess if you need to keep track of lots of events. Has Facebook figured out how to make calendars non-confusing?

> The thing with google groups is, it's not really a walled garden -- it's just a mailing lis

Yes and no. It's not much of a mailing list for the people without Google accounts who couldn't figure out how to subscribe after Google made the documentation for doing that hard to find (they used to have a decent page about it that was removed). That's quite different from other mailing lists.

Thus the anecdote about someone who asked how to subscribe, which was solved by a group admin manually subscribing them. I'm certain we lost a number of other people who didn't want to bother an admin enough to ask for help, and just gave up.

What we found over time is, eventually, a lot of the people reading the group thought it was a forum, and either posted via the Google Groups web interface (never using email), or didn't post (and therefore interact) because clicking the Post button took them to the Google login/signup page, and that put some of them off.

> Anything is a mess if you need to keep track of lots of events. Has Facebook figured out how to make calendars non-confusing?

I find Meetup ok for this, because I can see in chronological order what I found interesting today and in the next week or so. It tells me what's the next event I signed up to. And I can see a good selection in chronological order that I might like to take an interest in, because I signed up to a bunch of groups.

Facebook events also seems to be ok if you are only ever invited to very few events on it, as I am. I still miss them because I only login about once every 2 months these days :-)

It really depends on the details. I was having a conversation about this this afternoon. If you're trying to grow a community of (even) an open source project and your purist take is email and IRC or the highway that's probably going to limit your participation. Not 100%. Some will be committed enough to deal with not using Slack or whatever. But many potential participants will be F This.

Do you mean that email and IRC are both poorly suited now? If so, what do you use instead of email for an open source project these days?

If your answer is Slack, someone like me is not going to get involved, because I find Slack disastrously clunky and I can't archive and search it the way that happens automatically with email, nor can I get sensible notifications from it about specific things I'm interested in when someone brings them up.

I am subscribed to a bunch of Slack channels (e.g. for Rust & Go), and it's just so much of a pain I found I ended up not bothering to open it most days, so I just drop in occasionally to have a look. That's fine as long as the community doesn't care about me of course, but presumably open source project growth is affected by that sort of thing.

You're describing the fragmentation problem--which is what we were discussing this afternoon--exactly. Some people won't use proprietary products. Some can't be bothered with IRC. Some of those will use certain proprietary products but not others because it means they have to use a client for one particular purpose.

A lot of people find email lists "old school."

So you end up with fragmented communication channels. Everyone is "happy" but you end up with a number of different sub-communities not talking to each other. It's worse than it's ever been IMO.

Even the people who thinks email lists are 'old school' have an email address. That's the power of it.

But if they're not interested in using it for community communications, the fact that they already have an email address doesn't much matter if they won't use it for that purpose. They have a phone number too but they probably don't want to use that either.

There's no great solution. Ultimately you mostly have to meet people where they are or are willing to be. And that probably means that different groups are on siloed channels.

> You're describing the fragmentation problem

That's a real problem, but actually I wasn't describing it.

What I'm describing is how I found Slack difficult to work usefully with to a significant degree, compared with other platforms I've used.

Therefore, when evaluating its effect on community growth, it's not as simple as "use Slack nowadays to grow an open source community", because it acts as a significant repulsive barrier towards some of us (who are relevant to that community), even if it's attractive towards others.

It's not so much fragmentation as functionality; and those might be solved if there was better federation between systems to allow a broader range of tools.

The reason this is not just fragmentation is illustrated by my result with the Rust & Go communities: After trying out the Slack channels, and finding myself only dropping in once a month or so for a peek due to the tool being clunky, I lost the motivation to go looking for other fragmented sub-communities until I'd eventually find a "good" one. As a result I haven't gotten involved in any, despite the initial interest. I'm too busy with other things, and other communities. So I'll just passively consume the product now for a while, until reasons to put in the effort come up again. And I'm someone who is actively interested in the projects as a PLI person. Just an anecdote, but I think this repulsion effect is not great for open source community building.

It may not be convenient for you, but it was most probably very convenient for them to set up the group on FB, rather than figure out some other solution.

This, and the fact it costs nothing monetarily.

As I said, that is arguably the reason. But I think we have passed the point where that is actually the reason now.

A group like that is looking to achieve a mission-oriented result, not just hang out with like-minded people. So convenience is a factor. But I know a few people who have set up Facebook groups this summer while being annoyed at Facebook, in the correct believe that that's where the people are.

It's different for other kinds of communities. E.g. a gaming community tends to set up a Discord group, and a programming language community, well... I'm no longer sure if there's a single "place" for those any more.

I think the problem is the ability to interoperate.

Big walled garden owners have no obvious interest in letting other people link in and OUT of their network. But anything in the network is interoperable by default.

I think to fight something like FB the outside world would need to unite over algorithms and data formats. There should be ways trivially import and export data, ways between blogs to communicate when they're not all on wpress or tblr. Otherwise the big guys win with no resistance. Various IM applications can't send messages to each other. You need awkward solutions like Pidgin and one account per network.

Finally I have a scientific proof: quake champions grand finals had 2 American players vs 2 Europeans. The Euros had one guy from Netherlands and one from Lithuania. The Euros lost by a big margin but had some scary single combat skills. By comparison, their voice channel was nearly silent. There was noticable delay and hesitation to communicate enemy movement and situation. They had to use English to communicate and for both it was a second language. I don't think either of them was bilingual from the start.

Lots of comments about internet infrastructure being decentralised. In my opinion, there is a difference between decentralised architecture and decentralised control.

For instance, a single company could deploy a decentralised system. It may suit their use case better, be more fault tolerant, whatever. But they still control all of it. If they want to take the system down, there's nothing about it being decentralised that prevents them from doing that.

The same thing happens with decentralised internet services. Yes, many services are decentralised. But it ends up being easier letting a small number of groups control the majority of the nodes. This is just centralisation with extra steps.

Take Cloudflare for instance. It's decentralised, there are servers everywhere, it makes the internet for resilient and faster. But if Cloudflare decided it wanted to take a piece of content down, they could do so right away (cache times notwithstanding).

Solving the centralised control problem is very different to creating good decentralised architectures. Most tech people focus on the latter and think in doing so they have solved the former (they haven't).

I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the Internet is decentralized, and in a far more fault-tolerant fashion than the meshnet-of-the-day. The fact that anyone can fire up a server and make it accessible to anyone else on the Internet should be indicative of that.

Maybe what we mean when we say we want a 'decentralized internet' is implicitly, that we want the popular nodes of the Internet Graph to be decentralized. That would be nice.

But I think we could realize that right now, the Internet is comprised of a ton of competing protocols, and as long as there's a translation interface that enables cross-communication, the internet will remain decentralized. That's impressive resillience. Kudos to the designers.

It seems to me that what would actually bring the most benefit to the structure of the Internet would be long-range wireless communication. Basically, the ability to use HAM radio to bypass ISPs. That would bring about a sea change in how the Internet is structured.

How would these people using (HAM) radio links to provide Internet access be, in the long term, different from existing ISPs?

I don't think they necessarily would be - but they're another option, and they're harder to block since there isn't a cable to physically cut.

Who physically cuts provider fiber as a way to intentionally censor or sabotage the Internet?

Undersea cables get cut occasionally, fiber gets disconnected...s##t happens. I'm not even talking about anything intentional.

Edit. But to answer your question, some activists in the middle east have some stories to tell you. It doesn't have to be literally cut, state mandated filtering works too. Good luck jamming a HAM radio set.

State mandated filtering will affect you regardless of physical medium. Running radio will not make it especially harder. If they want to get you, they'll either impose laws, or send people knocking down your door. They don't need to jam or cut anything.

Not sure if your last sentence is sarcasm or otherwise, but radio jamming is trivial for state actors if they really tried. It's been matter of fact since radio was invented and the cold war has plenty of episodes of broadcasts being jammed by both sides.

That's true. Didn't think that part through. Still, even in cases where there isn't overt jamming or filtering, it seems like the ability to set up direct, long-distance connections would make a big difference in how the internet is structured.

No need for luck jamming a ham radio operator. Even the most permissive ham licenses only allow a maximum of 1.5kW PEP with many bands limited to 200W. Ham bands also aren't very wide which means it would is trivial for a state actor to jam them.

But an unfriendly government doesn't even need to bother with jamming. A ham (or pirate operator) relaying Internet traffic over radio would be trivially easy to find. It's fairly easy to triangulate the location of a transmitter, especially one constantly keyed up. A government frowning on such activity would just triangulate the transmitter and go arrest the operator. An extremely unfriendly government would just blow up the station, operator and all.

If you want to make some decentralized network go buy some cantennas, leave hams out of it.

Ham radio can't be used for commercial purposes nor can it carry encrypted content. Operators also have to be licensed which means all of their personal details are on file with the licensing government. If they're caught breaking the bounds of their license it will be revoked and they can personally face fines and even criminal charges.

Even if you got a bunch of hams to illegally carry general purpose Internet content the ham bands aren't exactly brimming with available bandwidth. Most packet radio below 30MHz (where you'll get your long range transmissions) is commonly 300bps. That's bits per second. Instead of risking hams go buy some cantennas and set up a WiFi mesh.

> Ham radio can't be used for commercial purposes nor can it carry encrypted content. Operators also have to be licensed which means all of their personal details are on file with the licensing government. If they're caught breaking the bounds of their license it will be revoked and they can personally face fines and even criminal charges.

I know that, it's what I was referring to when I was talking about the ability to use HAM radio. It's trivially easy to relay packets over HAM bands right now, given a transciever; the biggest thing preventing fairly wide-spread use is the legality.

> the ham bands aren't exactly brimming with available bandwidth

Even slow dialup speeds would be nice. I'm thinking of more-or-less direct internet connections between e.g. the US, Europe and Russia, or even just over a few hundred miles. Doesn't have to be fast; the ability to send anything at all over that distance in a direct connection would be an improvement. A wifi mesh can't do that.

Lay off the ham stuff. It's not and will never happen. Anything you suggest is just pirate transmissions so go suggest a totally illegal pirate wireless network with no power limits or band plan.

Eh, it might. Would probably rejuvinate the field. There's a lot of advances in digital signal processing that could be applied to those bands. The limitation on encryption would have to be lifted first, and maybe the commercial limitation you mentioned, but that's likely the only thing that would have to be fixed. Overpowered transmissions aren't needed.

I don't get why you think I'm suggesting pirate transmissions.

I think GP is saying that there would be a sea change IFF

1. there was legal unlicensed radio bandwidth for any radio services that had cognitive radio capabilities (constant frequency hopping, coordinating frequencies with other nodes after negotiating what frequencies, ensuring the radio bandwidth used is only using whitespace or can be empirically proven to not interfere with other radio transmissions)

2. HAM radio bands aren't touched. Some HAMers are grumpy enough about radio licensing dogma / vigilante radio spectrum law enforcement duty, no need to kick the hornets nest of telling them that not only are radio licensing rules changing from the paradigm introduced in the 30s (see point 1) but that it would remove some of their own dwindling radio bands as well.

The author of this article, Samo Burja, also gave a great lecture in 2018 called “Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge and the Future” (https://youtu.be/OiNmTVThNEY) which was mentioned in Jon Blow’s popular 2019 talk on software complexity, “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” (https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk). Burja’s talk is worth watching if you’re interested in his analysis of technology and history over an even longer period, and it provides some context for his remarks at the end of the article about intellectual institutions and the benefits of centralisation.

Decades ago, the average person considered AOL as the "internet". Today it's Facebook/Google etc. In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0?

My point is that the pendulum will swing away again. It's already happening. Blogging, podcasts and a long-tail of businesses that are not Facebook or Google are thriving. In some sense they never went away in the first place. In the coming years, this long-tail is likely to garner a lot more attention than it has so far.

> In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0?

You're "remembering" a pendulum that did not ever exist. The online services like AOL became web portals like...AOL and really only died out as social media sites like MySpace and later Facebook replaced them for the "average" user. There was no magical utopian era where Web 2.0 darlings dominated either in terms of users or raw traffic over portals or social media sites.

The non-existent pendulum isn't swinging the other day. Outside of a few niches blogging is a ridiculous amount of SEO spam and content farms. While some podcasts seem to do well I sure come across a lot of dead ones. It certainly looks like a lot of "podcasts" are moving to YouTube and the like for better monetization if they didn't just start as a YouTube channel.

Maybe blogs and podcasts will somehow find a way to thrive but right now it looks like they're just trying to game algorithms rather than make good content. Since that's how they get paid I can't exactly fault bloggers or podcasters for doing it but it's far from the Platonic ideal of either medium.

You're conflating producing content with getting paid. I remember a time when you could find blogs that were actually interesting, and people banded together to form communities, and no one was getting paid for it. The problem here is that, thanks to Twitter, YouTube, et. al., everyone has a megaphone now, and it's just almost impossible to find the good stuff in all the dreck now. And anyone who rises to a level of notice on one of these "platforms" starts putting their good stuff behind paywalls these days.

I really like this article, and especially the calling into question that smaller/decentralized is always better. I've had the intuition for a while that decentralization is sort of a hope of end-running around power structures, but as the article hints at, the power structures don't really go away, they just becoming less legible. Think about the failings of holocracy, or tyranny of structurelessness, or even the way framework-less software projects tend to end up with ad-hoc, buggy frameworks implemented in them. In other words, the structure is there, you've just reduced your ability to influence it.

A fine criticism but I always see people cite "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" and not Reinventing Organizations, a book documenting 12 >50 people companies that run successfully in non-hierarchical ways: https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/pay-what-feels-righ...

Why should centralisation and decentralisation be mutually exclusive? The author makes an excellent point that many things in our society are centralised for the better (police, infrastructure, etc.), but the entire point of those who oppose excess of centralisation online is that people should be able to choose for themselves. There's enough room for both types of services.

Is police really a good example? It's highly distributed on city/town level.

That's true, and arguably bad, because the result is that accountability and reform occur on the local level, where there are inevitably fewer resources for oversight.

The most centralized "police" in the US in the form of the FBI or the DHS or what have you aren't exactly models of accountability though...

And yet I know far more about their scandals and failings than I do of the keystone cops running my local police. And activists in my city have been in the streets for months, and there has been very little reform of the local police.

In both cases, we don't know how much we don't know. The abuses of both that we aren't aware of are hard to account for, so I don't see there being a clear answer to this matter.

Activists struggling to reform a local police department doesn't seem like great evidence that it's easier to reform something like the FBI.

Consider the possibility that if you know way more about the malfeasance of federal agencies, that it is because they commit more malfeasance. And if you don't believe that's true, then perhaps you know more about your local police than you think.

It's already pretty hard to compare them, but really, does the FBI shoot/kill more innocent folks than local police?

The recent protests were not against the FBI, but against local police. The FBI has some checks and balances built in (Office of Inspector, Congressional oversight), whereas it turns out mayors can't even fire the police chief (without cause), and the police unions are pretty damn powerful.

You're definitely right that it's hard to compare them, but it seems likely to me that the FBI would shoot/kill all sorts of innocent people if there were like 700,000 FBI agents instead of 35,000 and they did all the stuff that local police do...

Could be, I mean sure, it all depends on training, the institutional culture, etc. I'm simply not sufficiently familiar with the FBI to try to guess what would happen.

But as many [ex-]police chiefs said, they already do too much, and unsurprisingly the budget for training and hiring qualified personnel is too small. (Though it seems that some manage to pay for "Warrior Training".) Basically every locally rendered service is suffering from the dreaded cost disease[0] in the US, and of course to make matters worse the labor share of income is down (and inequality is up), and so on.

[0] http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarr...

is it? if I think chokeholds are an inappropriate tactic for police, it's much easier for me to persuade my local government to ban the practice than it would be to get the federal government to ban it nationally.

Please provide some examples of federal agencies being held accountable.

That's true for USA, but I believe that most countries have national police forces.

The Internet is an uneven playing field - each individual human mind trying to find optimal behaviours against centralised ranks of programmers and algorithms picking them off one by one.

But there is hope - we need to build agents that are designed and regulated to act in our best interests - and operate in a world where certain practises get banned - for example should the price for a given item on an e-commerce site fluctuate each visit making price comparison shopping all but impossible? Should facebook be required to publish the feed in machine readable format so my phone can ignore most of it and let me know if there is anything i want to read by my rules ?

Agreed, software agents acting in our best interests is the way forward. BYOI bring your own interface.

Basically, you have described RSS feeds and/or email.

I presume the issue is that most non-technical people are simply incapable of consuming content that comes without a front-end like Facebook.

I'm reminded of the factoid that hunter-gatherers and nomads were healthier, stronger, and had more varied diets and lifestyles than farmers living under the thumb of centralized states, which begs the question of why farmers didn't just leave their fields behind and escape into the wilderness. A key part of the puzzle is probably that it takes significant skill and knowledge to forage off the land, while farming takes considerably less skill and more grunt labor. Humans shifted from a small population of hunter-gathers to a large population of taxable and conscriptable farmers-from-birth that forced nomads out into marginal lands where farmers couldn't survive. It seems that the internet is going through a similar dynamic. Highly skilled tech wizards that can roll their own equipment will continue to exist at the fringes, but the mass of less skilled and centrally manipulated users will dictate the momentum of the internet going forwards, much like how highly populated agricultural states became the dominant historical force based on their sheer mass and numbers.

Both ancient farming and hunter gathering are skilled jobs that require co-operation and long term planning - I would be surprised if you or I could hack it at either job !

Farming has for a long time been this "mystery" - and afaik the debate is still ongoing. My understanding is that farming produces a regular "income" of calories, with a storage function - similar to the desire for SaaS based "subscription" income as opposed to one off sales - one is just psychologically "safer".

On top of this you can then add the farming surplus, investment in static capital like buildings etc.

My take is that it is a give and take between fixed buildings that offer protection from migrating tribes leads to giving up the following the herd which leads to fixed buildings which leads to grain storage which leads to ...

references: looking up now

I don't think this is a good analogy. Farming is in fact more difficult than foraging. You need all kinds of technologies to actually make it work (you need to seed, you need to take care of it, you need to harvest, you need to store, you need to process it properly). And on top of that, some of the activities are really back-breaking.

Farming has now won because it was easier, but because it allows for bigger populations and bigger population means safety against other groups. Foragers are limited by the current amount of calories in the nature, which is not that high. This forces them to migrate, but migration limits the amount of young kids that you can have. A pair of hunter-gatherers would usually have kids every 4-5 years to that the youngest one can be carried and all the older ones can walk on their own. Farmers don't have to migrate so they can have a new kid every year (even though higher infant mortality will even this to some extent). In the end there is a hard limit on hunter-gatherer group size (tens of people), while farmers can scale their society to millions (as has happened in China fairly early on). When there is a conflict between these two groups (e.g. about who should use some land), it is easy to see who will win eventually.

I think I have described a world where a legal framework exists such that "content" I create belongs to me and cannot be assigned away, that is designed to make my digital footprints available to me and licensable by me.

Work by and caused / inferred by me should be mine - and there should be a legal obligation to store and make it available to me - or never use it.

I think that would sort most of our problems out - probably cause another set but ... there we go

I think Activity Pub would work well if the federation servers were run by real towns / cities / states.

One of the things that I like about Movim[1] is that the servers that are currently running it are literally just named after countries.

If my town can uses tax money to run a server for all residents, I think that's pretty cool.

It feels more subsidiary. It maintains some amount of connection to the real world while also providing a genuine service. It feels more like a road or trash pick up service.

[1]: https://movim.eu/#try

Think lawmakers and operating within the law can be untangled as a separate topic, part of the problem appearing is that the platforms are now using their own set of rules.

This becomes a problem when the platforms are essentially the gateways for the mainstream to access information. The early days of the web had a bit of 'build it and they will come'- if you had something interesting it would eventually get seen and linked to. Now you have to 'pay to play'. There are numerous stats about how much % per dollar goes to Facebook and Google when advertising. If you don't pay, you're much, much less likely to be seen.

The platforms are in a position of power and perhaps regulation can curtail that power. We are essentially looking at the information on the web via a lens that the platforms and their algos provide, and there aren't that many dominant platforms to provide the number of perspectives we perhaps need.

It's easier than ever to get content online thanks to the likes of Wordpress, but harder than ever to get people to see it.

Most webmasters who have an inkling of some information about SEO are too scared to link out in fear of receiving a penalty from Google. Now social media platforms are acting as the Internet police. This kind of thinking stifles the way the web was supposed to work.

I'd probably go even further than the author. Not only is the internet a centralising technology but virtually all technology is centralising. Ted Kaczynski was a little bit crazy but not wrong, technology with its facilitation of scale, interdependence, relationships across space and time and creation of division of labour and complexity creates hierarchies and the need for organisation. The places on earth that are distinctly free of centralisation are places that are in the literal sense of the word primitive.

However unlike Ted and like the author I don't think this is a negative thing. I never understood the sentiment by Barlow mentioned in the article, I just thought it's juvenile. Most people when faced with the decision of living in the frontier town with a gunfight next to your house or suburb where the garbage truck comes every morning chose the latter and I don't blame them

I can think of plenty of technologies that are decentralising.

>> There is a long-standing collective dream of independent digital republics and empowered, autonomous, self-educated individuals.

Well that's what twitter, facebook and the rest are. They're just not small and they're not republics.

Moderation on Facebook and Twitter can be solved by letting us choose our own moderators and moderation rules.

Twitter has a toggle for obscene material. Give us a toggle for misinformation.

Because that works so well on Reddit. /s

If reddit allowed you to select a "personal mod team" that you followed, it'd be different. Instead mods can ban individuals and remove content. I think GP is suggesting something more like:

> I want RT/Fox/CNN/MSNBC/NYPost/Wapo/NYTimes/LATimes/etc. Twitter, vetted by their teams. Allow me to filter Twitter's content based on the input of my preferred "trusted" moderator.

This largely removes Twitter from the equation. They remain a platform for content, and others get to choose which content they interact with either freely (without moderation) or under their choice of moderation.

This assume the push for more "moderation" comes from the users of these services.

I'd argue the push for moderation isn't coming from the users, but from various government and media organisations who want to control what information the public is consuming. They have no interest in you being able to click a button and see media outlets reporting on the wrong things.

Personally I believe we need regulation that require these platforms to allow users to opt-out of moderation and timeline manipulation. But again, this assumes those in power have an interest in freedom of speech which isn't the case.

Aether does this. You can choose your own moderator.

https://getaether.net/

The problem is mismatched incentives. There's no reason for Facebook or Twitter to let you hide content that wastes your time when they profit from wasting your time (a better word for "engagement").

Remove the "engagement" revenue source (or make it unprofitable due to liability, regulation regarding privacy, etc) and most problems with centralized social media will go away (centralization isn't actually that big of an issue - plenty of things we use on a daily basis are centralized and it's not causing any issues as long as incentives are aligned).

It is missing one crucial truth that dispels the thesis: The fact that a social network does not need to be owned by one entity for everyone on it to be able to interact with each other. See Federation[0], federated social networks like Mastodon[1], PeerTube[2], Pleroma: where you have an account on a Mastodon "instance" (computer), but you can talk to anyone speaking the same protocol, ActivityPub[3]. A Mastodon account can follow PeerTube accounts and Pleroma accounts. And no one controls all Mastodon servers, your Mastodon server is controlled by your server administrator. The author does not seem to understand the internet fundamentally. Email is an example of a federated communications protocol. [0]: https://fediverse.party/ [1]: https://joinmastodon.org/ [2]: https://joinpeertube.org/ [3]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Everyone knows about network effects.

Nobody thinks about the security of the users. None of our computers are secure, we all know that. We won't click on links to unfamiliar sites, or open unexpected attachments. There is safety in sticking to stuff that is centrally moderated in terms of just plain malware, if not politics or decency.

I'll be honest and say I lost interest in the article when they made the assumption that Twitter is a news platform. It's not, regardless of what Jack Dorsey says to courts or the US senate. Same for Facebook. These aren't "news platforms" so they can justify their abhorrent behavior, they are vanity communication platforms that have little to no moderation and now that they are starting to moderate their platform from misinformation, the right cries violation of "Freedom of Speech". Freedom of Speech only goes so far as to limit what people can tell you you can say. You can say anything you want. But to say it, or post it, once said, is no longer under your control but society's.

> The dreamers of the decentralized internet now place their hopes in blockchain technology, which promises to break governments’ control of currency and the tech giants’ control of the internet. Many intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and investors, from Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz to World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, have staked their reputation, careers, and plans on this vision.

The article linked for Tim Berners-Lee talks about Solid[0]. Lumping that in with cryptocurrencies is a bit much, unless I'm missing something.

[0]: https://inrupt.com/solid

Organized, coordinated power with talent and capital behind it seems to win, and this maps onto the centralized vs. decentralized distinction fairly well. I don't disagree. But in the conclusion, the author talks about finding ways to conceive of a positive future, or what a positive centralized internet looks like, and I'm having a hard time doing so.

To me, the more the internet centralizes, the more likely we get extremes. This means Good Judgment Internet Regime, and it also means Exponential Stasi Regime. I guess we'll see. Anyone have ideas here?

Centralization is inevitable. Scale-free networks grow hubs through preferential attachment. The hubs are the center(s). Basic network science.

Read Albert-László Barabási for details.

Thanks for the reference. ‘Emergence of scaling in random networks’ (1999) seems like a good starting point, and the author is sharing a copy of the version printed in Science on his website: https://barabasi.com/f/67.pdf

Is it Albert-László Barabási's conclusion that centralization is inevitable?

There are different kinds of inevitable. In systems with preferential attachmnent dynamics, hubs grow. You can break them up, but growth (and centralization) is the natural tendency barring any other force. Barabasi doesn't form conclusions on this, he shows the math and articulates the process.

I don't know what different kinds of "inevitable" exist, but I take it to mean unavoidable; inescapable. In that sense, that there is a natural tendency barring any other force towards centralization doesn't mean that it's inevitable.

I have no idea what this is about after reading the first 3 paragraphs, so I stopped reading.

The Post story is a bad example for being an outlier. The same story was rejected by numerous other press outlets for being a likely fraud. It is only remarkable in the the Post, over the objections of several of their own journalists, decided to print an extraordinarily dubious story that has crumbled under scrutiny.

The article is disingenuous: "One wonders why Twitter staff didn’t respect the traditional privileges of journalists." No, one does not wonder. The story collapsed as quickly as every news outlet, including Fox News, that rejected it had supposed it would.

This is not a story of journalism being manhandled by big bad tech. This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards and not allowing a false story to propagate.

> This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards

But why, the Post is in fact a newspaper. Why do you want Twitter (which is not a newspaper) to make editorial decisions about what gets published or not, rather than actual newspapers?

Because Twitter, as a US corporation, has free speech rights. This allows to say whatever it wants and enforce whatever community standards it wants on the content in their network.

In purely business terms, it is probably in their long-term best interests not to go along with the alt-right disinformation campaign. The internet is littered with the corpses of companies that catered to that vile crowd.

I'm not asking why Twitter was allowed to do that, I am well aware that Twitter is a private company, believe it or not. I'm asking you want them to do that. Why are we better off if Jack Dorsey decides what articles people read?

Yes, I do want curating from most of my news sources. Nobody(a) has the time do do full background checks on all the stories we read. That curation of relevancy and truth was one of the most important functions of newspapers and it is good that it is appearing in the online variants.

There will always be the unfiltered version out somewhere, the internet is not centralized.

(a) yes, some people will lie and claim to be able to research and determine the "truth" all they read themselves. Dunning-Kruger has something to say to those people.

I absolutely agree that curation is good, but my question is why do you trust twitter to curate more than an actual newspaper? Did the unnamed bureacracy at Twitter talk to the reporters at the Post to determine whether their methods were sound? Do they have training and education to follow journalistic standards?

Similarly, do you want Gmail to decide which emails you should read? If you subscribe to my newsletter, and Google decides they don't like what I'm saying, should they make sure you don't see it? If I publish an anti-government newsletter through the mail, should the post office decide not to send it? What about my ISP? Should they have a say in what I read?

Twitter is not a news source or aggregation network. It's a social network and specifically not a publisher with editorial control.

Exercising control over people's communications (especially when Twitter's CEO calls social media a human right) is a major problem and is not a position they should be in.

Twitter didn’t make an editorial decision about what was published. The Post published their story, on their own site and in their own tabloid, without interference from anybody. Twitter had no control over that. Twitter did have control of whether they wanted the story to be amplified on their site, and—like most news agencies who evaluated the story using traditional journalistic standards and found it raised too many red flags—they apparently decided that they did not.

> Hardware backdoors have been mandated by the U.S. and now the Chinese governments

hmm -- the US source here is from 2015 about 'plans' and the the china source is about a discredited bloomberg article

I thought this was going to be about BGP, DNS, and the root certificates. The actual topic (twitter and a few other random websites) is far less interesting.

the world is balkanizing , he is wrong. its just right now certain players are dominent. 4chan has the least censorship of platforms right now and is probably the closest to global platform you can get. all others have to align some what with their countries origins. twitter vs president is just an internal dispute.

> the authority of Western newspapers was forever reduced.

Nope. Twitter's was expanded. These are not the same thing.

> China has its Great Firewall and Russia has its “Internet Iron Curtain.” But democracies differ only in how quickly, and under what narratives, they adopt similar measures.

because we say so (I guess they forgot to add this last bit)

> Twitter's was expanded.

I'm not sure that's actually true. Twitter did not stop the spreading of the information it suppressed (the author of this article knew perfectly well what that information was, after all). It just made people route around Twitter to get the information. The more people realize that they need to route around Twitter to get the information they want (just as they now route around traditional journalists to get the information they want), the more Twitter's authority is reduced just as the authority of traditional journalists was reduced.

I think the author of the article has not sufficiently considered this aspect.

> I think the author of the article has not sufficiently considered this aspect.

I agree, but are we talking about this because it's the first time it's happened for such a high profile story in the US? Will we still be talking about it the third or fourth time it happens?

No, because their own policy team said that they've made a mistake on how they've handled it and that they have no plans to do that in the future: https://mobile.twitter.com/vijaya/status/1316923557268652033

I lay all of this at the feet of email not evolving into the use cases people have.

I seriously wished this was posted by a one "Agent Smith" :-D

> On Wednesday, October 14th, Twitter locked the accounts of a White House press secretary and the New York Post, one of America’s largest tabloid newspapers. The accounts shared a story the Post ran on leaked emails which seemingly implicate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son in corruption. When users tried to share the story publicly or privately, they found a message informing them that their tweets could not be sent. Chinese users of Twitter mused on the feeling of déjà vu, as links to corruption stories sometimes vanish on Chinese social media apps like WeChat as well. For a moment, the paths of the Chinese and American internets once more converged.

This is just preposterous.

On the one hand: a widely used but private corporation decided to block certain accounts and links on its service, because it doubted the truthfulness of what was being posted. The extent to which the decision by said corporation is in keeping with the interests of its governing state is unclear, and could be argued several different ways. Meanwhile, numerous other services and media talk about the same topic blocked by the corporation, both broadcast media and internet-based media (and those that span both).

On the other hand: a national government removes and blocks posts on certain topics. No services accessible via normal means within the jurisdiction of said government carry any material related to any of these topics. Access to information about them requires relatively specialized network access. No broadcast/mass media ever carry items regarding these topics.

How can any sane person even suggest that there is any kind of equivalency between these two things? The only thing that connects these two stories are the scale of use of Twitter. If Joes Weekly Blog (jwb.wordpress.foo) or some similarly obscure network context chose to block anyone from the NY Post or links to it in the comment section of their blog, who would write an article about that?

So why does the scale of Twitter, rather than its fundamental nature, allow an otherwise apparently intelligent individual to equate Twitter's behavior with that of the Chinese government?

And it has been here for more than a decade already.

The internet is not that important.

Sometimes a divided internet is better than a hopeless one;

Ethereum..

The next question: should we force Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. to submit their platforms to open protocols the same way Mastodon is?

Maybe the answer isn't getting everyone to use Mastodon; maybe it's using anti-trust law to force the big centralized companies to operate more like parts of a federated system.

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