Centralized or Decentralized There Is No Question | Hacker News Reader

Centralized or Decentralized There Is No Question

puri.sm

> keep it in your domain. If you keep all your services within your own domain you retain control over the asset.

Domains are governed by registrars which are clearly "centralized" according to the definitions of the linked article.

Well, you could use ENS.

Sure, if you ran an Ethereum client locally -- which is of course infeasible for statistically everyone. Otherwise, you're still delegating trust to a third party.

Well, you don't have to trust a third party, and it's verifiable. Anyone can run a DNS bridge (including yourself) and anyone can verify that it is behaving correctly.

Unless you do that verification work as part of each DNS query, clients are still delegating trust to whatever service is responding to their requests.

Matrix and Mastodon are federated but not decentralized. I don't understand why the are getting advertised all the time. Alternatives like Zeronet are truly decentralized and barely get any mention.

In Matrix conversations are decentralised by being replicated across the participating servers. It’s not just federated.

Matrix isn’t p2p by default though - although there is a project to address that: https://arewep2pyet.com

I don't think Decentralized has a business model with a profit mode.

Bots are now a fire-hose of LLM nonsense content, and thus the unregulated service failing in a Tragedy of the commons mode becomes a certitude ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons ).

Good luck though, it would be neat if it did work for some reason =)

Simply selling standalone software for a fee, perhaps?

Selling a commercial version of community projects usually doesn't go well.

i.e. those paying for the storage and bandwidth tend to notice the asymmetry rather quickly.

Everyone must get fed at the table in business (lifeboat politics) =)

That's the other thing, most software shouldn't depend on third party infra. Nowadays a user could be easily enabled to selfhost.

I thought this explained well why decentralised systems are useful for people

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