Comment by st26
8 years ago
Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity.
The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up.
The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand.
That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.
I saw someone post on Twitter saying they were tired of being their own sysadmin.
It's true - I could set up my own mail server, my own Git hosting etc etc, but why would I? I'd rather just pay Fastmail for email and GitHub for some private repos.
I'm my own sysadmin (for personal email, small HTTP server, an OpenVPN and a few other minor services for personal use) and while it did take me a non-negligible amount of time to get things running smoothly it now only requires a few minutes of attention every other week to apply security updates and make sure my backups are running smoothly. In exchange for that I have total control over my data and basically unlimited customization potential. I'm definitely not planning on stopping that.
I do use Github regularly however, but it's because of the "social network" aspect. If you want to interact with many open source projects it has to be on github nowadays. The network effect is strong.
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Have you tried mailcow? I find it strikes a pretty good balance between running your own mailserver while not getting overwhelmed with details.
It runs in containers and provides a webserver, webmail, caldav, spam filter, updater... I have made an ansible role that will back up to a Borg repository every hour as well as restoring the latest backup upon installation if you need inspiration: https://galaxy.ansible.com/coaxial/mailcow/
If you use your own domain name, you can set mailcow to sync with your Gmail account so you have all your emails in mailcow and then pull the plug on Gmail without losing anything. I find it runs pretty well for me on a server with only 2gb of ram.
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Decentralized =! inconvenience
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For the same reason that you don't opt for a dictator even though it is more convenient than democracy (until it isn't, at which point there is little you can do about it).
Also, you could also instead pay people to develop easier solutions for self-hosting. Or you could buy a service from a smaller hosting provider. There is more than the extremes of "google is email" and "I have to hand-carve my mail server".
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Decentralized doesn't mean you have to host everything yourself, there are many other companies to pay to host things outside your server. You don't want everything hanging centralized on your hardware anyway, if your server dies, everything is down.
That's true, except it is not common for a server to "die" every second day. It is not a problem to have uptimes in years. But due to updates it is reasonable to have a few minute downtime every few months. If you require 100% high availability (which only handful of people and companies really need) then you can set up a cluser on Kubernetes/Docker.
We package GitLab with Omnibus - it makes the installation experience a breeze. See https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/ for more info.
We also offer a hosted service (GitLab.com), if that's more convenient.
Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab. One to add their GPG key, one to add the upstream repo, and one to apt-get install the package. I bet there’s a curl | bash script to do all three as “one step”.
If you’re going to complain about something, at least pick something legit like managing backups or server uptime. The install itself couldn’t be simpler.
>Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab
As if installing gitlab was the last step in setting up a highly available and disaster safe git server.
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for the one step curl | bash glory:
curl -s https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitl... | sudo bash
For EE:
curl -s https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitl... | sudo bash
>>Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab
It was not always that way, they have made huge improvements on the install path over the last couple of years.
I got tired of managing all that software so I just moved to containers. The Docker Hub has pretty much all I need, and if it doesn't, it's much easier to get it working than spinning a new VM or trying to install it together with a bunch of other software and keep them all up to date.
Have you tried Gitea [0]? It's incredibly easy to setup, and if you run it on Debian you can setup Unattended Upgrades [1] once then you pretty much never have to worry about it again.
[0] https://docs.gitea.io/en-US/
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades
Ben Thompson at Stratechery has been banging the centralization drum for a while. His take is the sheer scale of the internet imbues tremendous value to any centralized service that can organize it (e.g. what Google does for web pages or Facebook does for your friends).
If this is the case then the internet may end up more centralized than previous forms of media and communication. I hope that's wrong, but it seems to be happening right in front of us.
So that's how Stratechery is spelled! I have been listening to Exponent for a while and failed to find the site on Google.
How is it meant to be said aloud? I've always wondered.
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I think the big problem is not so much centralisation as it is that people are locked into platforms.
There's nothing wrong with using Gmail for email hosting if you have your own domain name, it's easy to then switch over. But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.
Same story with Facebook, there are quite a few people that I would possibly never be able to contact again if Facebook banned me or them. This isn't a new problem caused by Facebook though, in previous years there was the same problem with email, and before that, if someone changed their address or phone number you'd lose contact. There are actually people who I lost contact with who I regained contact through Facebook.
Anyway, my point is that centralisation isn't bad if it's painless to decentralise again. Git and Github are fine, at work we could switch to a self hosted solution or Bitbucket in a fairly trivial amount of time. Same for our work emails, we could switch form Gmail to another host with fairly minimal disruption. Centralisation with locked ecosystems, like Facebook, are not good.
Yeah, I wanted to say exactly this. There's a different between specialisation in a market that still provides competition and consumer liquidity, and monopolistic centralisation (even when the monopolist is effectively benign).
It's like there's a middle-ground between everyone building their own automobile, and there being only a single car manufacturer on the planet. So long as have you have a few players who are genuinely competing, and you have the option to switch between them without paying an excessive penalty, then it's a good thing that a certain subset of people are working hard on building better cars than you ever could tinkering away in your garage (although you should still be allowed to do that, if you so desire).
What this requires is for governments to provide a framework of standardisation, access-to-data, data-transferability, and antitrust enforcement that allows a healthy competitive environment to emerge and persist, without either allowing a monopoly (or a cartel) to evolve, or overburdening everyone with regulation.
It's a difficult balancing act, even in more traditional industries, and anyone who presents a too simplistic "more regulation!" or "less regulation!" answer to it isn't being honest. Tech presents additional challenges because it's newer, and because it's evolving rapidly. I think it will take many more decades for the necessary level of technical understanding to metastasise through policy-making and civil administration realms until you get effective control of tech markets, although laws like GDPR are an interesting start.
> But if you use an @gmail.com email address and Google decides to ban you, you're screwed.
You can loose control of your domain too. And if someone else snatches it up they could even read your newly incoming email. I'm willing to bet when gmail bans an account, they don't recycle it.
I'd love to see GitHub (and GitLab) offer a custom domain name option which would proxy HTTPS and SSH clones via a company's custom domain (e.g. code.example.com) to GitHub's hosting. That way, if a company needs to move away from GitHub (or GitHub goes away), developer's references to some company's code is not stuck pointing to some stale github.com domain.
Hosting such a proxy (and the repos) takes infrastructure, time, and experience to secure and make available, so from a user's perspective it's great if a company does this as a service as long as you provide the domain.
Has there ever been a plan for Git to support looking up SRV records? This would solve your problem without proxies.
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Maybe we can eventually achieve something like decentralized ownership of centralized web resources.
While not quite decentralized ownership, Wikipedia is at least a non-profit that everyone contributes donations to. Where's the Wikipedia for code? Where's the non-profit donation-based social network?
> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization,
It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves.
In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it.
For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.
Hmm, of those, if I could specify "pick one of these 20 DNS resolvers at random for each query" I might...
Sorry, tangential thought, I agree with your main point, and the others are much tougher.
> Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization
How so? Centralization is merely enforced by the government and incentivized by the system it exists in.
If centralisation only occurs due to government enforcement, then how did government itself come into existence? It's the purest example of centralisation, after all. There must be something that incentivised centralisation even in the absence of government.
Many humans are social creatures and like to congregate.
> The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.
Eh, I have Gmail, but I barely use it.
Regarding DNS, that's only because the DNS provided by ISPs is being tampered with or runs downright awful.
What happens is people copy each other's behavior. X (friend of Y) starts using Facebook. Friend of X starts using Facebook as well. But X never looked into the alternatives (who has the time for that plus everyone is using Facebook); its only because of other people that they started using it. It is called the network effect [1] though we can thank the early adopters for feeding that hype. I see it as a sign of capitalism/optimization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect