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Are we decentralized yet?

(arewedecentralizedyet.online)
487 points Bogdanp | 6 comments | 30 Aug 25 19:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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Animats ◴[30 Aug 25 19:59 UTC] No.45077547[source]▶
Keep the needle pointing north. Towards the center of that dial.

Too decentralized, and you can't find anything. Nobody uses it.

Too centralized, and censorship takes over. Nobody can speak freely.

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1. treyd ◴[30 Aug 25 20:13 UTC] No.45077646[source]▶
You're presupposing that discoverability requires some degree of centralization.
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2. Animats ◴[30 Aug 25 20:34 UTC] No.45077785[source]▶
We haven't seen a distributed Google yet.

It's not impossible, but each distributed component would have to be at least a small data center.

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3. treyd ◴[30 Aug 25 20:46 UTC] No.45077864[source]▶
Google search does a lot more complex processing (crawling, historical weighting) and it does it on unstructured pages. Discoveravility in a microblogging system doesn't have to be a lot more than indexing/collation of structured posts, and end-user clients can be designed to participate in that. "Retweets"/"boosts" are already a form of that.
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4. cheeze ◴[30 Aug 25 21:13 UTC] No.45078055{3}[source]▶
Sure, but fediverse numbers are pitiful at this point. Reality is that 99.9% of users don't care about decentralization, so it ends up being a "this has to work as well as a centralized system" does.
5. fsflover ◴[30 Aug 25 21:28 UTC] No.45078162[source]▶
> We haven't seen a distributed Google

https://yacy.net

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6. Animats ◴[31 Aug 25 00:04 UTC] No.45079118{3}[source]▶
You can index your own stuff and propagate that index to others. This is what people would have thought good when Gopher was a thing.