Well, "distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer network" worked well enough, back when, to differentiate e.g. Kademlia from Napster.
But interestingly, people also called BitTorrent a "distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer network", even though BitTorrent requires trackers. None of those adjectives allow the differentiation of the Kademlia design (a network of dumb nodes with smart, active clients that walk them) from the BitTorrent design (a network containing both dumb client nodes and smart server nodes, where the clients register with the servers.)
"Serverless" is the word for what Kademlia is and (pre-DHT) BitTorrent isn't. Or what differentiates a wireless mesh routing system from a 1980s BBS store-and-forward architecture. Or what differentiates IPFS from, say, the network consisting of all Lotus Notes clients + all Lotus Domino servers.
(The funny thing is that AWS Lambda is not "serverless" by this definition. AWS Lambda is just a PaaS with a CGI-alike ABI. Now, if Lambda was an ABI standard; and everyone ran a mesh of their own Lambda nodes; and your newly deployed Lambda function could end up running on any random node, without a first-class "server"/second-class "client" node separation; then that'd be "serverless." It'd also basically be Ethereum or Urbit or another of those wacky architectures, rather than Lambda any more.)
But interestingly, people also called BitTorrent a "distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer network", even though BitTorrent requires trackers. None of those adjectives allow the differentiation of the Kademlia design (a network of dumb nodes with smart, active clients that walk them) from the BitTorrent design (a network containing both dumb client nodes and smart server nodes, where the clients register with the servers.)
"Serverless" is the word for what Kademlia is and (pre-DHT) BitTorrent isn't. Or what differentiates a wireless mesh routing system from a 1980s BBS store-and-forward architecture. Or what differentiates IPFS from, say, the network consisting of all Lotus Notes clients + all Lotus Domino servers.
(The funny thing is that AWS Lambda is not "serverless" by this definition. AWS Lambda is just a PaaS with a CGI-alike ABI. Now, if Lambda was an ABI standard; and everyone ran a mesh of their own Lambda nodes; and your newly deployed Lambda function could end up running on any random node, without a first-class "server"/second-class "client" node separation; then that'd be "serverless." It'd also basically be Ethereum or Urbit or another of those wacky architectures, rather than Lambda any more.)