How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

Niello@kbin.social to Technology@beehaw.org – 192 points –
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
ploum.net

A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.

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The Fediverse seems like a good place to implement a distributed, block chain based peering setup. Join a community and share the hosting

OMG why do tech bros try to force blockchain into everything

Think less "Bitcoin" and more "Freenet." IMO the point shouldn't be to try to monetize stuff, it should be to decouple content from the instance it was posted on (i.e., to mirror popular content across instances to distribute the load) while still maintaining control and attribution for the user that posted it.

But how does blockchain, as a technology, help with that? The Fediverse already has a mechanism for distributing content across multiple instances.

I think at this point even tech bros hate people that try to insert the blockchain and cryptowhatever into everything.

doesn't have to be blockchain based, but there should be some sort of incentive for people to take up the burden of hosting (and moderating, I guess) like blockchains have for people to run nodes, or instances will start shutting down eventually when the people who were footing the bill get tired of it. Or maybe I'm wrong and instances will survive on donations and goodwill of their moderators. I'm not sure how that'd work if communities get really big though

That's not going to work for web hosting. The only reason it works for crypto or folding is because each request takes minutes to run and there's no time dependence on returning the result. Additionally, they don't need much data and all data needed is dispersed with the task.

Websites are completely different. Each individual request is tiny, taking milliseconds to process. Each request is very time dependant, you have a person literally waiting for the result. But the biggest issue is that what people really want is stuff from a database. So that database would need up grant full access to everyone, meaning anyone could change whatever they wanted. Lastly, that database would need to be hosted anyway so you've gained nothing.

Don't suggest tech solutions when you don't have any idea what the problem or solution actually involves.

At a simple level- a lot of that happens already.

Moving around between communities is quite seamless, even though most of them are hosted on different servers, and even different parts of the world.