decentralization is (imho) a very poor characterization - what is wanted is target diffusion. in California-speak, “It’s all about me!” I could care less if my access to AT&T, Twitter, etc. are broken, I DON’T use them - I do have some folks hanging off AT&T that I do care about so access to them is important. To borrow from the subject line - there are -millions- of Captains /bill Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. On 14January2014Tuesday, at 11:48, rysiek <rysiek@hackerspace.pl> wrote:
Hi there,
Dnia wtorek, 14 stycznia 2014 11:28:08 Odinn Cyberguerrilla pisze:
(...) But how often do you hear people talking about what is needed to literally Decentralize Everything?
Well, except for posts occasionally on lists like these, or meetings / discussions with like-minded people, or hackerspaces, or development discussions, the answer is Almost Never.
Yes, because people do not understand why it is important. And it is not limited to the (let's call it) "digital domain", look what's happening in retail. Just try *not* buying Unilever, for example...
Anyway, this recent ruling announcement re. net neutrality (or its death) here in the USA is just one more example of how we cannot rely upon laws, at least in my view. But it also made me think some more about this and realize that if we want decentralized protocols / solutions to spread at all, we have to do a way better job at being good advocates for them and talking about them incessantly to everyone in a way that is easy, simple, and makes sense to people.
We need more than that. We need to understand -- yes, us, the tech community -- that for people to use decentralised services, these services must, absolutely must!, be compatible and interoperable.
Case in point: you can talk till you're blue in the mouth about federated social web, but even once you get a person convinced to ditch Facebook for it, you get The Question -- "So, which one should I use? Diaspora? Friendica? StatusNet? Pump.io?"
The proper answer, the answer we *have to* be able to give, is: "use any of these, they talk to each other".
This is, sadly, not the case. The Not Invented Here syndrome is killing us. Look at what moving identi.ca from StatusNet to pump.io did to the federated microblogging community...
As this post already exhibits I can be very wordy and windbaggish. Further evidence of that fact is presented amply in my recent post here: https://odinn.cyberguerrilla.org/index.php/2014/01/02/opensourcebuildguide/
As I reflect on this I think about the following.
1) I need to make something shorter that easily introduces people to open source stuff. Something that's even simpler than prism-break (http://prism-break.org/) - an option which is so simple that anyone (at least in primary school levels) can understand it and act on things presented in it within less than a minute. Look. Software. Click (one click, two max!) to get it. Done.
2) What are some ways to Decentralize Everything? To the DNS and beyond? Stuff that comes to mind (remember, there is no one thing, there are no captains, there is no one solution, these are just examples of possible partial solutions being thrown out here): 2)a. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/ 2)b. https://github.com/namecoin 2)c. https://nameid.org/ 2)d. concepts like this http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat-censorship-for-good -140105/ 2)e. Convergence for namecoin https://github.com/JeremyRand/Convergence/tree/namecoin 2)f. Convergence (a different one) https://github.com/moxie0/Convergence 2)g. Tack.io - for pinning (it's my understading that moxie0 prefers this direction, but I haven't been tracking it closely enough to say what is going on with it right now) --> http://tack.io/ 2)g.1. See also the Tack internet draft(!) at http://tack.io/draft.html 2)g.2. See also reference TACK implementations https://github.com/tack
So...
As I read through this, and similar stuff, I think to myself, something about this needs to be broadcast in a way that it is so easy to do, so simple to accept, that it meets the "everybody sees it (or it's in the news) and they click and download it"
I know it's never really that simple. But I am throwing this out there because even more censorship is coming. And there are no captains, and we do need to decentralize everything. We must get A Lot more people on board with decentralization, open source, and as close to p2p as possible, we need to make it so easy to defeat censorship of anything that those who propose allowing it to happen will just throw up their hands in frustration. So the question (one of many!) is how to present this in a way that makes sense to a lot of people.
A lot more than currently.
OK I am done for now.
your thoughts please
Consider one idea for getting people to use decentralised social networks instead of failbook: http://rys.io/en/88
-- Pozdr rysiek