I keep seeing comments like this. “Man, if only people cared about decentralization” or “this proves that centralization is a failure”
As if we don’t all know that and have thought that forever.
All of this stuff WAS decentralized before Reddit.
IRC was decentralized before Discord and Slack. Decentralization lost.
We can’t just be ideological about software we have to be pragmatic. You can’t just say “let’s throw up a decentralized Reddit” and boom problem solved. You have to figure out how to build something that is sustainable, that people want to use, without a bunch of money. That’s super hard.
I think a more practical approach is starting software companies that aim smaller, and don't take on VC funding. Imagine a version of Reddit that doesn't need to IPO. That only has a staff of 50-100 employees. Same with Uber, or whatever.
I think ultimately, decentralized services will always fail over centralized ones because they're less controllable. If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service.
When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it (because of what you've heard) or you don't promote it's use (because you're worried about what people will think of you) - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people.
If we can change software companies, stop thinking of them as "startups" and treat them more like normal companies instead of these potential multi billion dollar companies, I think that's a path to something more sustainable.
> If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service.
You could say this current upset is about Reddit management being pressured into censoring more to appeal to advertisers. What you call "controllability" is a double-edged sword.
> When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it [...] or you don't promote it's use [...] - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people.
The same argument can be made for the Web as a whole, which despite appearances is still decentralised. When was the last time you heard a lay person say that they weren't interested in a website for their business because only unsavoury types use those?
This is an implementation problem; people will self-host (or rent from Linode or w/e) if that's simple and not too expensive, and they'll take the centralised, ad-funded option if self-hosting is too hard and/or the loss of privacy is deemed the lesser cost. While concern for privacy seems to be on the rise, ideology has never been the deciding factor for the plurality of users.
As if we don’t all know that and have thought that forever.
All of this stuff WAS decentralized before Reddit. IRC was decentralized before Discord and Slack. Decentralization lost.
We can’t just be ideological about software we have to be pragmatic. You can’t just say “let’s throw up a decentralized Reddit” and boom problem solved. You have to figure out how to build something that is sustainable, that people want to use, without a bunch of money. That’s super hard.