Comment by discussedbefore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by discussedbefore | Hacker News Reader

discussedbefore

One decentralized project is willing to list alternative options, many past the 'create a prototype' stage:

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/faq/misc/related.html

ZeroMe – Decentralized Microblogging on ZeroNet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15464156

An off-grid social network [Scuttlebutt] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050049

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A recent discussion of building on IPFS, where a developer was honest about drawbacks:

OpenBazaar 2.0, powered by IPFS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702684

haven't solved the decentralized reputation problem and reviews can't entirely be trusted

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I am interested in this space because first mover advantage is still kind of up in the air until something works well enough to build a network advantage.

Any thoughts on Mastodon[1][2]?

I think "federated" is the term for its model, moreso than "decentralized" (?).

[1] https://joinmastodon.org [2] https://instances.social/list/old

That's the right word.

(General note)

Federated is a bit different from decentralised. For example, email is federated, but not decentralised. In a federated network, if "your service providing server" is down (like gmail.com), then you don't have service, though others on other parts of the network would continue to have service. With a decent sized network, there is no "your service providing server" and other machines can take over when one fails. Decentralisation always goes along with redundancy whereas federation doesn't require redundancy.

You're thinking of distributed. Decentralized is broader than that. Really anything that isn't centralized like Facebook is.

Obviously a lot of this is very squishy and overlaps a lot even within the same system.

Look at DNS. It's nominally a centrally-rooted hierarchy, but the root is operated by consensus rather than monarchy, so how do you classify that? Then each domain can be operated by a separate organization, so essentially federated but not exactly because it's still a hierarchy. Meanwhile the recursive resolvers and caches are fully distributed -- use any of them and the results are (supposed to be) the same.

edit: I meant "decentralized network" and not "decent sized network" .. as auto-correct decided.

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