Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours | Hacker News Reader

Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours

alexdanco.com

32 pointsivanvas3 comments

There's something to be said for offloading typical maintenance problems with your own hardware and software such as maintaining backups, storage capacity, synchronization, updates, upgrades, data security, reliability, interoperability, compatibility and versioning.

Centralizing these problems really scales. Decentralizing gives you some advantages but doesn't scale these decisions for you, they become your problem.

I desire decentralized software but it must be easier or as easy as the centralized solution to scale properly.

I like operational transformations, local first, offline first, CRDTs, merkle trees and diff3 and git. I like snapshots. I like deduplicated backup and encryption during transit and at rest, but these are all problems that are expensive in terms to implement and engineering time. The decentralized solution requires every Dapp (decentralized app) to use an API that provides encryption, presence, synchronization, identities, authorisation, authentication, data storage, CRDTs. As a dapp developer, you offload a lot of decisions to your users.

I think that issue is overblown. There certainly are tools availble to make decentralized storage much more reliable than they usually are. All OSes come with solutions to those problems, we just have to make people use them. But there's no incentive for companies to do that except for commercial customers. Yet they have found out it's much harder to charge their customers if they do it themselves, and individual customers service managing the customers machines is much harder and cost-ineffective. So the incentives are not to make better tools for the customers and users to use on their own, but to make better centralized tools. It's about control and charging for services. I think the customers play a smaller role in pushing the shift from decentralized to centralized data storage than is usually admitted.

Good discussion on this from 2019:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21392784

Reply on news.ycombinator.com