Im confused. You can already set up your own fediverse server, just as you can host your own personal blog.
Decentralization is just a parameter of how many people choose to join an existing server or create their own.
Decentralization is just a parameter of how many people choose to join an existing server or create their own.
This of course isn't important for everything. Centralization can even be good at times. But an example might be like browsers. Technically anyone can run their own. But since the ecosystem is so Chrom{e,ium} based, Google can exert a lot of control over what standards are set on webpages and how to process data. You might have heard about them trying to destroy the cookie. Which in part I feel is great, but at the same time it's not like they aren't still tracking people. Either way, the point is that a singular (or even a few) compan{y,ies} shouldn't get to dictate critical infrastructure. This can actually even lead to fragmentation, especially when we consider that more than one country exists.
So it has to be easy, near trivial, to run your own server, and must also be cheap, if you want a highly decentralized platform. If it isn't, there's always a strong pressure for centralization.
Things tend to get centralized because users want to be where users are. Developing another platform doesn't change that. Even if that platform just straight up does not allow centralization, it doesn't stop people from using centralized platforms.
This isn't hard for people like you and me, or probably most of HN. But it is difficult for the public. It is hard to set up. It is hard to keep up. It's costly.
I think maybe a good comparison is to PGP. PGP's greatest flaw was that you could reply back that you couldn't decrypt and the sender would resend the message decrypted. Encryption hasn't made its way into the mainstream until companies like Signal showed it could be easy, and then it was picked up by WhatsApp and iMessage.
I'm with you that it isn't "hard", but you need to recognize that this is a comparative word and that not everyone is like us.
Nothing about a federated instance is fundamentally any more challenging than setting up any other service.
Looks like its available here as a managed instance https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
Anyway, I think the bigger issue here is most users simply don't have the need to. I was big into this whole "lets decentralize the internet, screw these big corps". I setup a lemmy instance, then just forgot about it entirely. What the hell am I going to do with it?
On the no side, there are literal dollar costs to decentralization in that you have to host the server and pay for that bandwidth. I'm conflicted about this because the cost is always being paid somewhere. Like there's examples of how people will not buy a product if shipping is not free even if the total price is less than the price of the version with free shipping. So if you see your internet bill go up you might ignore how other bills might go down (things like healthcare might be a good real life example of this complexity in evaluation?). I mean isn't Microsoft distributing windows updates through P2P now? Shifting bandwidth costs to users? Are streaming services getting in on this?
> Anyway, I think the bigger issue here is most users simply don't have the need to. I was big into this whole "lets decentralize the internet, screw these big corps". I setup a lemmy instance, then just forgot about it entirely. What the hell am I going to do with it?
And I think this is actually coupled. There is the problem that anything with a network effect naturally shifts towards centralization and thus monopolization. Because the utility of the product is the centralization even if by centralization we mean "people are here." I think this makes a great case for why we would want decentralized services, because it enables more competition as we allow the switching of platforms to not cause such disruptions. But I think this part can't happen until it is essentially trivial to do the setup part, and until there is enough critical mass of existing servers. Maybe we could force running servers or default to that?
Somewhat connected I was thinking over the weekend about how to actually push technology forward and thinking about how Google constantly kills products far too early. I wonder if the actual best move is to reframe our thinking around what Apple is doing with the Vision Pro. Product isn't great but they push it because they know that people will buy it because of the name brand. They can't fix all the problems with the system until they get enough people using the product, but shipping out samples and trials is too expensive. So do we as consumers (and especially those with disposable incomes and especially those with excessive incomes) rather need to reframe to think that we should be using our purchases in part simply to vote for technological directions and not entirely on utility? Such as if you want to see VR/AR become a reality is it worthwhile to buy a VP even if you never open the box? Because this is the signal that companies are internally using to gauge product viability and that metric is often misaligned due to things like people actually wanting the product but the implementation is just not there yet so they don't buy it?
Sorry if this ended up being ranty, but I think it is potentially relevant here because I think people do want these decentralized services/platforms given how much negative attitudes there are to the centralized versions. Same with privacy and security. But I think a big part of this might be the economics and the path to viable product being difficult playing as big of a role as the literal technology itself. Maybe I'm off base?
I mean look at email again. how many people, even technically proficient people, setup their own email server? we've mostly just accepted google's dominance in the area and are ok with them even leveraging it to impose sometimes ridiculous rules of who can send email to whom and how it will be presented. why should the fediverse end up differently, if the basics are quite similar (if not a bit more complicated)?