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by jbackus
2884 days ago
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Author here, thanks for reading! Regarding "decentralization can only exist to circumvent the law", I don't think that in the long term (>5 years out). I touched on this a bit in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641098 Regarding privacy, I'm with you there, but I'm very skeptical that very fuzzy privacy concerns can switch enough people away centralized systems with network effects (FB, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube). I think these systems will see adoption from a few groups: - Privacy advocates and people otherwise interested in the tech by itself
- Ostracized groups. For example, see how Voat (not a decentralized system, but an example of a Reddit clone with a ideological mission) wound up as a hub for the alt-right.
- The most extreme people trying to boycott platforms like Twitter. For example, people demanding way more censorship from Twitter that are trying to make Mastodon happen because it has content warning stuff and other anti-harassment stuff from what I've heard
- Communities that are forced out by the law, like r/DarknetMarkets moving to Dread: https://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-decentralization-... So, subcommunities definitely will exit I think but whether they go to other centralized systems depends on UX (which is harder with decentralization) unless a legal reason makes decentralization the only option. |
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I see your point ; I think there is actual and genuine interest in privacy and decentralization from what I see within my friends circle, but I may be biased because I'm active around ssb myself (and my friends may very well be interested in this because ... I'm interested in it). Time will tell :)
Regarding incentive for legal reasons, there's an other possible one that may happen (mentioning it for exhaustivity). Yesterday, I was reading an article about how an extreme-right candidate was favorite in brasilian elections. I was thinking : "oh look, an other fascist about to seize power". It feels like it's been a recurring theme this decade. And this is terrifying : could you imagine what the gestapo would have been with access to facebook data?
It doesn't even need the entire world to go mad before the incentive for privacy becomes very strong, 10 or 20 countries with strong engineers would be enough to kickstart it.