I don't understand the fetish for decentralization.
I have a love-hate relationship with the centralisation-decentralisation debate. Much radical decentralisation advocacy seems to embody little more than wishful thinking. Centralisation affords efficiencies, but at a cost of resilience, as has been widely realised of late, and of power control, if my notions here are accurate.
One possible resolution is to accept necessary, or inevitable, network control points / monopolies, but to ensure that control is shared, distributed, democratic, and/or principled. Public utlities, multiple stakeholders, public input, and the like.
Capture, corruption, apathy, mismanagement, incentives alignment, and the like, remain risks.
I feel the same way and it might be we have a love hate relationship with these ideas because there is probably neither a perfect centralized or decentralized system, but rather there is goodness in the middle somewhere, and it's easy for said systems to shift to far to one side for various reasons.
Largely agreed, which makes for accord but lousy debate ;-)
In light of the monopoly-power-control dynamic, though, I see frames for analysing and room for thinking about how federated systems should be structured to avoid creating cryptic control loci.
As an example, Mastodon (on which part of this discussion is occurring) saw a remarkably bad interactiion two hears ago when a set of griefers followed Wil Wheaton from Twitter and swamped Mastodon's feeble harassment and abuse detection-and-mitigation systems (they've been improved, I'm given to understand).
Diaspora, where I'd posted this article, has a nagging (though unclear if growing or just persisting) issue with disinformation and propaganda dissemination. On the one hand, effects are pretty limited without algorithmic amplification. On the other, blocking, reporting, and content- or account-removal seem ...underpowered.
The worse forms of abuse seem infrequent, though, which is a good sign.
Experiments with building voting into normal usage (like 'choosing mods' mechanisms) seem to be addressing some of those issues, although not without costs.
I have a love-hate relationship with the centralisation-decentralisation debate. Much radical decentralisation advocacy seems to embody little more than wishful thinking. Centralisation affords efficiencies, but at a cost of resilience, as has been widely realised of late, and of power control, if my notions here are accurate.
One possible resolution is to accept necessary, or inevitable, network control points / monopolies, but to ensure that control is shared, distributed, democratic, and/or principled. Public utlities, multiple stakeholders, public input, and the like.
Capture, corruption, apathy, mismanagement, incentives alignment, and the like, remain risks.