[souterrain]

> But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still alive but it is often

Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. It seems both decentralised mail and content netizens have little choice but to seek shelter with large service providers as a defence from the trash on the net.

I’m not saying the large players have a hand in spam, but they certainly aren’t being harmed by it in the same proportion as the individual hosting their own blog or smtp server.

[SquishyPanda23]

> Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation.

I think this is very close to the heart of why decentralization hasn't worked (yet?)

Try to design a decentralized system that is resistant to abuse, and really think through the loopholes as an attacker would.

It's very difficult.

Decentralization is little villages. Little villages are weak and they gain strength against their common enemies as they band together.

So there's a natural force toward centralization that isn't countered by anything but a lot of slogging through the engineering challenges of trying to make decentralization work.

[SllX]

Decentralization works all the time in meatspace, but when you have a wide open channel of information anywhere, it tends to get flooded with lots of bad information.

Email spam is the obvious one. Algorithmically promoted conspiracy crap was the less obvious less predictable one that bit YouTube and other services and is much harder to police because it turns out the police are also just as biased and dumb as the people they're trying to police, just in different ways.

Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with increasingly sophisticated malformed information, and at some point it will probably devolve into an arms race of these programs trying to con the other programs. I think Anathem had a passage in there about this, "insanity programs" or something to that effect, can't really remember, but until that day, you'll have to actually pay people to disseminate your own carefully crafted propaganda instead.

Centralized services provide the illusion of safety against this in much the same way urban landscapes do, but there's no substitute to taking responsibility for your own safety, your own hygiene, and your own bullshit.

[kyuudou]

> Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with increasingly sophisticated malformed information

We've been there for a while now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7dfJ1lZ13g

[gonehome]

A lot of the intent behind Urbit is to solve this (which is why I find it pretty interesting) and push things back towards decentralization.

Basically have a small cost to creating an identity in the network to prevent spam. The system is peer-to-peer where each user has their own 'server' on their local machine which interacts directly with the server's of other users.

It's a pretty neat idea, they recently released their first version.

[souterrain]

Interesting. Seems like a cousin to https://solidproject.org/ but with Ethereum as a sort of identity provider.