Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by smt88 1637 days ago
Decentralization without blockchain has existed and worked for decades.
1 comments

Can you name one example of decentralized software?
Email, blogs, forums. Pretty much the whole internet in the 90’s. But then centralisation turned out to be more profitable, so they could hire UX designers and attract all the users...
BitTorrent and all the p2p stuff most 2000s kids grew up with.
RetroShare is pretty cool. Initial release was in 2006.

> Retroshare is a free and open-source peer-to-peer communication and file sharing app based on a friend-to-friend network built on GNU Privacy Guard. Optionally, peers may communicate certificates and IP addresses to and from their friends.

> RetroShare is a decentralized, private, secure, cross-platform, communication toolkit. RetroShare provides file sharing, chat, messages, forums, channels and more.

Usenet, started in 1980.
IRC or BitTorrent?