Thinking About Decentralized Communities | Hacker News Reader

Thinking About Decentralized Communities

gurlic.com

53 pointsSubGenius47 comments

I would modify your point #1 (decentralization must never be promoted to be a feature) to state: Openness, be it via a public API or freedom to take data out, should not be a central feature. Looking at the history of successful applications (Spotify, Facebook, Twitter) they have all offered a simple and well crafted experience, with open APIs at the start. I realize that they still have some form of APIs but they have been severely curtailed from their early days in all of my examples.

The openness of the APIs offers those interested the ability to create their own features on top of a base (Facebook games back in the day, Spotify's song previews on NYTimes "Best Music of 2020", etc) while still maintaining a central point that normal users can come to for the default experience. By letting power users build on top of it more users can be drawn in by the interested developers experimenting with new features and experiences.

In a way, these hip, modern, and flashy companies remind me of the ancient and dual unix philosophies of: "Do one thing, but do it well" and, for the power users, "give them just enough rope to hang themselves".

> The openness of the APIs offers those interested the ability to create their own features on top of a base

The tough thing is that those companies often close or undocument those public APIs because serving you ads is always more profitable than not. Open APIs also encourage aggregating and refinement behavior, which if done outside the parent company would be a detriment to their profits as well.

You're, in essence, asking one of two things:

- Figure out how to monetize APIs

- Change the incentives of the web to be less corporate

The latter would require that the web be significantly cheaper to run. The former would create quite an equal access and innovation problem.

> Decentralization can be a priority, but must never be promoted as a feature, or made to be a selling point. When decentralization becomes the main selling point of a product or service, the usability and polish tend to suffer. Not always, but nearly always. None of the marketing copy should include the words 'decentralization', 'privacy' etc. Normal users don't care about any of this.

I think this isn't quite the case-- these projects "nearly always" suffer due to decentralization being a priority.

Outside of perhaps darpanet, the decentralized projects that succeed do so because the decentralization is merely a value-neutral means to an end that satisfies a central use case.

E.g., compare usage of git to usage of every tool that tries to decentralize more parts of git in service of the general virtue of more decentralization.

Edit: clarification

I love the art page (gurlic.art). But for some reason it doesn't work reliably for me, many of the links go to "about:blank#blocked". Doesn't happen on every reload, and seems to happen less on gurlic.com/art.

Thanks for letting me know, I'll take a look.

> and I'm at a point in my life where I avoid that at all costs. I can only talk about my preferences about the world, not about how things ought to be, implying some sort of inherent value or divine moral good.

It sounds like you are scratching your own itch, which more often than not, is cited here on HN as a leading strategy for building new projects.

I tend to agree with your viewpoint on decentralization as a value-add versus a core feature. For instance, some companies may be adopting DLT databases because it eloquently solves a problem for them, but not so they can market the project as "blockchain".

Best of luck!

There's a problem with links to attachments, like this:

https://https//static.gurlic.com/post-attachment/75971640500...

From this page: https://gurlic.com/software/post/332791159409606661

Thanks. Should be fixed now.

Thanks, it works now.

The second requirement bullet point is solid, but I think it goes to far. Obviously user onboarding is a huge issue for new paradigms, and simplicity is paramount. But I think it's wrong to suggest that non-browser clients are not the way forward. Look at Whatsapp or Signal.

If Gurlic employs Clean Architecture, delivering its community to users through a web app or non-browser client is a decision that should be deferred or designed such that you could switch without rewriting most code.

But jesus I hate that book.

I would agree that a decentralized web is to the benefit of everyone, but we have most on the far left, and most corporations pushing for a centralized web. When the far left, and corporations have both aligned on an issue, we're going to get screwed. The center right, and center left will never agree, or unify to create a policy that decentralizes anything. This means, the far left, and corporations will win, a strange pair indeed.

The only counter is to centralize with opposing points of view, because nothing fractured ever is sustainable.

Is the far left really pushing for a centralized web ? Would you mind backing this statement up ?

All the far-left groups and individuals pushing for the censorship of “hate” and “misinformation” are pushing for a centralized web.

They're pushing for censorship on social media, but I wouldn't say that has extended to the internet as a whole. Nobody's asking for email filters or website blacklisting.

Not yet. They're all for payment discrimination though[1], which IMHO is as extreme as things can get anyway.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FETt5JzufY4

It goes well beyond social media, and internet. There are coordinated attacks by organizations with huge financial backings against political dissidents socially, financially and politically. Social media censorship is only the beginning. They already have come for people's livelihoods, bank accounts, jobs etc. Total castration seems like the end goal.

What is your definition of far-left? Democrats? Because the latter are not left in any sense of the word, beyond being more "liberal" than the far-right Republicans.

No leftists I know push for platform-provided censorship, because that inevitably harms left voices; eg: facebook taking down Crimethinc and It's Going Down: https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/19/on-facebook-banning-pages-...

Can you back up that only far left groups are against hate and misinformation? Those topics seem like topic that everyone would be against?

(Writing this from the EU, where most of the people have watched the past US election season with... "amazement". Especially the way in which both sides seem to feel they are the oppressed side.)

They posted those words in quotation marks. They're also subjective and prone to being defined by those with power.

It'll be interesting to see how EU/Western Europe copes over the next 20 years, if they cope at all.

Can you back up? Dude, pull your head out of the ground. Liberals are a dying breed. Liberalism is dying.

I think you're confusing technocratic liberal weirdos with "the far left." Look up the World Socialist Web Site's long-running feud with Google, or read any Jacobin article about free speech/tech. There are very few genuine progressives who endorse policing "misinformation."

technocratic liberal, as in Communists? The word for them are Communists.

Liberals are a dying breed.

I encourage you to engage with the outlets I mentioned. Regardless of the terms you choose to use, I hope you can appreciate how actual left wing organizations are at odds with the censorship measures called for by the New York Times, Silicon Valley, DC think tanks, etc. You can't fight an enemy if you can't even name it properly.

Most leftists, progressives & liberals are socially non-separable - both knee deep in CRT, censorship, twisting facts and outright lying the same way conservatives do.

ML's are probably the only ones who have any ideas of their own and support certain levels of freedoms at least.

After you been given references to outlets that are indisputably both on the far-left and prominent who hold the opposite opinion, you assert as a response that all far-left groups are inseparable and hold the opinion that both the WSWS (the oldschool Fourth International socialists) and Jacobin (the newschool Bernie-boosting 2016 socialists) publicly disagree with.

That's a complete aversion to evidence.

In the USA, liberals are those that support the Bill of Rights. The Democratic Party is made up of Liberals, and those that call themselves Progressives. I'm a Liberal, the Progressives scare me, as they are for complete Government bureaucratic control of everything. Biden won as a moderate, not a Progressive, but if he picks up that torch, I don't know what happens.

Yes, the far left is pushing for a centralized web. One where all websites are controlled, censored, and belong to a government.

To quote one in the USA.

"The right of the worker to have access to information is one of the most important of human rights. All information and technology should be held by the state whereas the state should proffer all information to all workers."

Well, we know how that works out. The person controlling the information is in control.

I advocate for combating hate speech using the same methods that are used to combat any other form of abuse, such as spam or malware. On the centralized platforms, that role is filled by the centralized gatekeeper. On a decentralized platform, whatever plan you have to deal with manual spam can likely be used to block hate speech just as well.

> any other form of abuse, such as spam or malware.

The difference you seem to be overlooking is that basically no one wants to receive abuse, spam or malware, whereas (depending on who is doing the censoring and who is being censored) maybe 30% to 50% of users want to receive the messages that the censor decides is "hate speech".

I think what you're actually saying is "I advocate for centralized platforms combating hate speech provided their definition of that term happens to agree closely with my own".

I'm not worried about the hangouts for the already converted. They can, and already do, use their own invite-only forums and encrypted chat systems for that.

I'm worried about radicalizing the moderates, which is comparable to spam and malware, because (by definition) it's not content that the moderate was seeking out, even if it is tangentially related to the content that they were originally looking for.

Neither corporations, nor the far left can do anything about existing federated protocols, such as email, nor will they be able to prevent future federated protocols.

They can. A white list will easily do that. Without net neutrality white lists would be more and more popular IMO

I think the fact that you characterize this as "far-left" is problematic. Authoritarianism and censorship are independent of left or right leaning politics, and have existed on all sides of the political spectrum in the past. See censorship in Stalin's communism (left) vs. censorship in Nazi Germany (right).

It's a far left issue because the people on the right are constitution freaks that love guns, god and saying whatever the fuck they want consequences be damned.

Let’s be frank here, the people on the right are constitution freaks for people who look _like them_. They aren’t freaks about the spirit of the constitution, only one that maintains their (white) supremacy.

Yes, lets be frank.

I believe the Constitution is color blind. The words, "All men are created equal...", did not specify a race. The problem the right has the how the left tells them how to think.

This is where progressives go wrong. Stop telling people how they should think.

That's a problem on both sides. Conservatives are judgmental AF about a lot of things.

Frankly, I doubt the two sides are ever going to come to proper terms, and the best solution is just to give power back to the states. Then you can have libtard Portland and klan Mississippi, and people who don't like it can just move.

Cafeteria constitutionalists.

> Any and all cryptocurrency/blockchain must be avoided.

Care to elaborate on that statement?

If you ever hope to monetize your decentralized community, how do you hope to do that without crypto? Accept PayPal? Rely on Google for advertising revenue sharing? With the increasing willingness to enforce censorship at the payment layer, it's very dubious to create a "decentralized" community without that key piece being also decentralized.

It would be up to each instance to figure out how they want to monetize their community, or if they even want to.

If there's more censorship at the payment layer, I don't see how crypto will be left alone.

I'm not the author, but I guess everyone who runs an instance can monetize it their way, just like email providers - some use ads, some charge money, etc.

I'd also like to know the reasoning behind this. It seems like every reason behind supporting decentralized communities would lend one to also support decentralized financial infrastructure like cryptocurrencies. Also strange that one would be specifically opposed to cryptocurrencies, as any criticism of crypto (abuse, kind of communities it attracts, etc) applies just as much to decentralized software in general.

Is Gurlic open source?

Not yet, but soon. It's very hacky at the moment!

Maybe that should be in the FAQ. I had to search the HN thread to figure it out.

You're right. I'll add it to the FAQ.

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