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Maybe Bluesky has "won"

(anderegg.ca)
461 points GavinAnderegg | 5 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bsimpson ◴[15 Nov 24 21:24 UTC] No.42151280[source]▶
Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.)

If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.

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mcpar-land ◴[15 Nov 24 21:44 UTC] No.42151495[source]▶
> Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists.

by the good grace of Meta Inc. and nothing else. Your account can get purged because:

- they decide to start purging old content

- they comply with a censorship order from the country you live in (or a country you don't live in)

- the CEO decides they don't like you (though that's really only a current issue on Twitter)

> Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism.

Decentralization is the bedrock of all the _most_ pragmatic internet technologies (DNS, HTTP, Email), centralization is a more recent phenomenon driven by a dozen or so very large companies.

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1. TylerE ◴[15 Nov 24 22:22 UTC] No.42151899[source]▶
This feels like an argument that stuffing cash under your mattress is better than keeping it in a bank. The number one cause of data loss - by far - is technical incompetence. 99.9% of users do not have the expertise to spin up an AWS instance and maintain it.
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2. josephcsible ◴[15 Nov 24 22:42 UTC] No.42152103[source]▶
The difference between Facebook and your bank is that it's illegal for your bank to just say "you don't have an account here anymore and we're never giving back any of your deposits".
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3. beeflet ◴[16 Nov 24 02:12 UTC] No.42153528[source]▶
You are stuck in a centralized mindset where the only way to host content is to pay someone else with a static IP address and a reliable connection to host it for you, and to pay a domain registrar to link to it.

Why shouldn't hosting a webpage or social media content be as easy and reliable as seeding files on bittorrent? Programs like syncthing are proof that this model works in other domains, for example "cloud" storage.

4. pm90 ◴[16 Nov 24 02:33 UTC] No.42153630[source]▶
I mean why stop there with this analogy? we didn’t solve that problem by building decentralized banks. As a society the solution we came up to this is regulations around what banks can or can’t do, how much notice they must give you. If user data is so valuable (and I would vehemently argue that it is) we must have regulations to protect that.
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5. johnnyanmac ◴[16 Nov 24 03:17 UTC] No.42153837{3}[source]▶
well, people are trying. Jury's still out on that one.

But yes, we're in a weird spot of "clearly this is altering society" and "it's just an app bro". The latter is shedding away, but the powers that be will try to delay it as much as possible to squeeze out a few billion more dollars.