Comment by EGreg

1 year ago

The technology has potential to be decentralized, but telephones were famously considered a "natural monopoly" and ended up centralized under Ma Bell.

Government split Ma Bell into multiple smaller pieces, but they still operated as a cartel and kept prices high. They had centralized telephone switchboard operators etc.

It is only when authors of decentralized file-sharing networks like Kazaa (who built them to get around yet another government-enforced centralized regime of Intellectual Property, RIAA, MPAA etc.) went clean did we get Skype, and other Voice over IP consumer products. And seemingly overnight, the prices dropped to zero and we got packed-switched networks over dumb hubs, that anyone can run.

That's the key. We need to relegate these centralized platforms (X, Meta, etc.) into glorified hubs running nodes and earning some crypto, akin to IPFS nodes earning filecoin, or BitTorrent nodes earning BTT, etc.

Everything centralized gets enshittified

Clay Shirky gave a talk abot this in 2005: https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_institutions_vs_collab...

And Cory Doctorow recently: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-04...

> and earning some crypto

You are not answering my main concern. Again, you snick in crypto into the discussion. Why?

We have decentralized stuff. Email, xmpp, matrix, the fediverse, all this works without this web3/crypto stuff. Those things are not perfect, including their decentralized aspect (sometimes to the point of doubting that decentralization really works well, although I personally think decentralization is a good thing).

I didn't downvote you but I suspect this is exactly why you are being downvoted. Since you asked. Many of us just think cryptos and this web3 stuff is bullshit and gets mentioned totally off topic without any convincing link to the discussion every single time.

  • Because crypto is literally how entities on a decentralized network get paid in an autonomous network. It's not via cash transfers. It's not via bank transfers. Or having accounts in some central bank.

    Look at FileCoin and IPFS, for instance. Once you automate the micropayments and proofs of spacetime, it becomes a cryptocurrency. And then the providers of services can sell it to the next consumers.

    Just because you hear the word "crypto" doesn't mean it's automatically off-topic, when it's literally the thing that is inevitably used by decentralized systems to do proper accounting and reward the providers for providing any services. Without it, you'll still be sitting -- as you are -- with no viable alternatives to Twitter and Facebook.

    • > Because crypto is literally how entities on a decentralized network get paid in an autonomous network

      That doesn't ring true. What is an autonomous network? Those things runs on the internet, largely backed by infrastructure funded by traditional money. Moreover, emails, tor nodes, xmpp servers, matrix homeservers, fediverse hosts... None of those need cryptocoins to fund themselves, and are indeed largely and for the most part funded using traditional money. Micropayments are also not something needed for decentralization.

      Decentralization is way more than just about decentralizing money and many of us don't trust crypto coins.

    • > it's literally the thing that is inevitably used by decentralized systems to do proper accounting and reward the providers for providing any services.

      Or just like, advertisement. ActivityPub, Matrix, PeerTube, NextCloud and Urbit are all fully decentralized and let any instance host monetize themselves however they want.

      Decentralized services, even for-profit ones, are not synonymous with cryptocurrency. Stop spreading misinformation to promote an unrelated topic.

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