Ask HN: Will peer to peer services overtake centralised corporations? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will peer to peer services overtake centralised corporations?

22 pointsasim21 comments

We've watched huge centralised services thrive on top of the internet and become profitable companies. With that we've benefited a lot but also lost a lot of control. I don't think I'm saying anything surprising or new. I guess what I'm wondering is. Will we ever see strong peer to peer alternatives to these systems in the long run? At some point will we get to a place where we're actually happy to use a service provided by one person rather than a large entity? Markets and exchanges have existed for goods. Individuals provide services offline. But it seems online we really don't do this as much. Maybe the app store is some of that but still it skews heavily to big companies.

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I think it has to. If SciHub and Anna's Archive have taught us anything it's that it just takes one person to offer an invaluable service to millions.

We're living in an age of unprecedented control by corporate powers, but we're also living in an age where it's very difficult to stop a signal from leaking from somewhere.

Corporations are currently building walled gardens and closing the doors behind them fast, but the scent of roses always wafts through the gates, and it really doesn't take much for a crafty fox to dig a tunnel.

So, you've sort of nailed it. You need someone who is willing to coordinate, but you can rely on protocols and technologies that allow for frictionless dissemination of information to do the heavy lifting. In the event of socials, PeerTube and Mastodon come to mind. Archiving is harder, you need someone to babysit spinning drives and physical media somewhere safe, hence why the Internet Archive requires more centralization and coordination (and a bit of deep pockets to fund someplace safe to store the bits and atoms). In your example, Bittorrent and torrents for the datasets being shared. If "information wants to be free," it can be done, but someone still has to herd cats (whether that be people and/or code) to bring about the desired outcome.

The piece to solve for is where the operations meets the legal entity, to ensure continuity and durability of the value provided. Again, look to the Internet Archive, Let's Encrypt, and Wikimedia to see how this is done. Certainly, it gets more challenging for an org like Anna's Archive that is in direct conflict with copyright law, but you can build and run high value, widely distributed systems without turning into Pied Piper.

Corporations are always going to chase fiat, it is inevitable, avoid relying on them whenever possible if you don't want to be disappointed when they try to corner the market and extract whatever they can from what potentially has become highly valuable at scale to the user population. Twitter and Reddit are the most glaring examples, but there are many others.

From a historical (and academic) perspective, most decentralized services seem to tend towards monopolization.

Telephones, radio broadcasting, and the Internet are all examples of once-decentralized, democratizing forces that were eventually centralized from a corporate control perspective.

I don't know if this will change in the future; it'd require either a very active legal agenda or incredibly engaged citizens/consumers.

"The Master Switch"[1] is a great book on the above.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire...

My experience is that it seems like a cycle. People get frustrated with centralised systems and move towards more decentralised ones, and then centralised ones get better at UI/UX design and take traffic from the decentralised ones later. I mean, we saw lots of walled garden services lose to the internet as a whole, only to see internet forums and chat rooms lose out to services like Reddit and Discord.

I wouldn't be surprised if people were getting more and more fed up with existing social media sites and online services, and looking into alternative technologies at this point.

No.

Crowd is always dumber and more inert than a small team of highly motivated and filtered (by market, luck etc) individuals.

Not likely. Most people are too lazy to do anything on their own and would happily pay money for subscriptions from centralized providers even when multiple, fantastic, easy, self hosted solutions are available.

Both internet and web are themselves examples of what you are talking about. Maybe you're too young to have lived through it but for entertainment everyone used to watch TV decided by a few corporations.

You'll hear little positive about them on hacker news but there are many projects attempting to turn centralized services into market based p2p open services. Not clear if any will seriously work out, bitcoin is probably the only thing that is really working. But not clear others won't work out.

The many examples of functionalities fulfilled by decentralized structures in nature indicate that this is more complicated. The endocrine system and immune system in your body are beyond current human technology capability and are decentralized. But they also exist alongside a centralized nervous system.

If bitcoin is like gold, which became the basis for all money transactions then we're still effectively missing the digital market for services and goods right. Not the current centralised silo controlled one but a real open market which I guess if is to follow real life, begins with the ability to congregate, communicate and facilitate this set of transactions whether it's for digital goods or services on a per request basis. I don't think the whole Blockchain web3 thing is really doing that. It's almost like you need something that makes use of it in a properly decentralised way. Meaning an app protocol?

> I don't think the whole Blockchain web3 thing is really doing that

I would argue most of whatever fraction of web3 projects are in good faith are trying to do exactly this. One reason to miss this is that most of the digital goods/services offered in web3 are financial in an economy that really only needs 0.01% the current level of finance in terms of its real value. There are some non financial projects which for the past year have branded themselves as "DePin" (full disclosure this is the area I work in).

> It's almost like you need something that makes use of it in a properly decentralised way. Meaning an app protocol?

The history of open markets for hard digital goods (not finance) is maybe longer than you think. If you read Brahm Cohen talk about his work at Mojo nation in the late 90s you'll see that early attempts at this left people discouraged about user demand, which is maybe what you are getting at with "app protocol". The comments of this old Unenumerated post have more ex-Mojo nation people arguing against similar ideas: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html

The situation is potentially different today with demand for more control over our digital lives and less trust in spy corps bubbling under the surface of what regular people want. One charismatic example is Blue Sky which is built on a data model ready to go for decentralized storage markets (though not using any afaik). All of the discussion around open models and AI safety also look vaguely like opportunities.

IMO a lot of future success depends on the cost curves of fundamental cryptographic primitives especially snarks (which actually look promising) and also on the potential for disruption with radically new primitives: non excruciating FHE, VDFs that actually work etc

There's nothing you can do about it.

I can't predict the future. Asking good questions is a start. How about a free, absolutely no fees, peer to peer exchange for anyone. We already have strong peer to peer alternatives in the long run so far. Other than convenience, there's nothing stopping anyone from leaving the walled gardens, destroying all apps, and even scuttling today's web protocol for something much better. I think that there is an appetite and opportunity.

Niche appetites and niche opportunities, sure. Mainstream though? Nope.

My mom and a billion other moms isn't giving up Facebook anytime soon, nor does she want to. What you perceive as "lack of control" she perceives as "communicating with friends".

60 years ago if you had a car you were also a part-time mechanic. 100 years ago there were endless car companies and startups. Turns out what people wanted was reliability.

Today there's around 10 large car companies who build a rounding error of 100% of the world's cars. There are also a couple hundred niche companies turning out a few cars a year. The niche exists and keeps them alive, but I don't want to "control" my car, I just want to use it to get somewhere.

So yeah, there are a bunch of techies who care about the process more than the result. They run Linux and use Mastadon. (And it's fantastic this exists.) But pretty much everyone else doesn't care about the OS, or web site, they just want to -communicate with friends- . They run windows or Mac and use Facebook.

Indeed nothing stops people leaving the walled gardens and removing all apps. Nothing except the fact that they have literally no reason to. They're perfectly happy because they don't care about the tech, the tech is just a means to an end.

I haven't worked on my car myself in 25 years. And it's a chore I -really- don't miss. I use a car to get places. It's tool not a hobby.

imo, in the current landscape we will not see any largely popular P2P services/platforms. Mastodon is largely a flop (it has a few deeply ingrained issues and a lot of usability problems), Web3 is a scam (nobody wants to pay money to visit websites), cryptocurrencies have too many usability & legislative problems to be widely useful, etc. etc.

One of the massive advantages that centralized platforms has is that they are almost always more convenient than a P2P alternative (think PayPal v.s. BTC, for example of a "send someone money" system), and newer P2P systems don't seem to be moving towards being more convenient. Until the convenience catches up, the masses will stick with centralized services.

I would consider (sadly) Matsodon as an anti-example. As much as we all know the issues with “the algorithm”, people find real value in automatic curation that I suspect is best served by a centralized authority.

Automatic curation doesn't have to be on the server side, much less by a centralized authority. An ML curation model won't even need the processing power used by client side LLMs these days.

All that said, my experience with mastodon is the opposite of what you described. I find the chronological feed to be always interesting and much less frustrating and emotionally draining than any curated feed that I know of. Members are a lot more considerate too. From the discussions there, I know that there are a lot of others who hold the same opinion.

I'm also in small online communities where people are well behaved and threads are high-value and on-topic. But these are side effects of being small, and are unrelated to the tech involved.

Mastodon seems high quality now only because "no one" is on it. It's currently self-selecting like minded people who are invested in making it work. Add a million people a day for a year and see what happens.

No community survives the eternal September.

The mistake is in thinking that the -tech interface- matters. It does not. The size, and quality, of the community directly dictates the size and quality of the content.

No. There are economies of scale that synergize too well with capitalist monopolies. Even the internet itself, originally peer to peer, is largely taken over by a few gigacorps. There's a strong network effect to most of these things and users prefer one big place to go rather than a loose federation of a thousand small ones.

A big part of it was also surfing the web is more or less dead. Google created a search engine which killed browsing. Now Google search is dead and people have lost the ability to surf.

Good point... discoverability these days is mostly controlled by the big corps too :(

crypto by it's very nature of being power hungry got centralized. and got taken away by scammers.

sadly the internet can't work like a real life bazaar. as in a bazaar the scammer would be held accountable and any destruction of trust by one individual would harm everyone.

if peer to peer services can keep everyone accountable then yeah they will take over centralized corporations.

Absolutely not. Never never never. Remember when little social media website ended up in the hands of a person a whole bunch of people don't like and some people left and other people stayed and just complained over and over just like they've been complaining over and over for a long time before that Even though alternatives existed and were going to exist in better forms over time and those people still stay on that platform and still complain even though they are being boiled frogs?

Take that situation and apply that to literally everything. People would rather be boiled alive and while they are being boiled alive they will proudly complain and yell... But they won't leave they won't jump ship even if something 1000% better exists and the friction to moving to that thing is nil.

People will act as though that thing that they are using and attach to and maybe even in some cases paying for is a public service or somehow inherent to their lives as a right or a lifeline when in all reality it isn't.

Centralized or decentralized has no bearing on this.

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