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Are we decentralized yet?

(arewedecentralizedyet.online)
487 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 19:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.249s | source
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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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maxbond ◴[30 Aug 25 20:04 UTC] No.45077578[source]▶
I don't disagree but I do wonder if a.) discoverability is really so intractable in a decentralized environment if you're willing to throw a lot of resources towards indexing and b.) if that middle ground isn't like balancing a pendulum upside down - a very fragile equilibrium. A bunch of decentralized units might join together, or a large centralized unit might fail, pushing the pendulum to either side.

You can think of the golden age of blogs and search as an example of both. Search engines formed a centralized hub with blogs, forums, etc. forming the spokes. For a while that worked well before it was degraded by spam and consolidation of disparate forums etc. into a handful of major platforms (fueled partly be acquisitions).

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1. shadowgovt ◴[31 Aug 25 01:27 UTC] No.45079516[source]▶
Fediverse makes the indexing question interesting because some people don't want it deeply indexed: they point to the practice of dredging up old opinions on Twitter as an anti-pattern that the tooling should not support. Indexing without permission is met with hostility / defederation over there, and both individuals and server owners have tools to switch fine-grained indexing on and off.

(It is, of course, fundamentally impossible to keep people from indexing a default-open network, but if one does it, one does not advertise doing it outside the service-supported mechanisms).