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Comment by purplesnowflake | Hacker News Reader

Moxie is no fan of decentralization. And he made why very clear with concise and incisive arguments.

His argument here is that web3, as it exists today, isn't actually decentralized. Also:

> These technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the ecosystem, and that most participants don’t even know or care it’s happening. This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.

Per the post, he's in favor of decentralization that "uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust," he's just skeptical that web3 will head in this direction.

No, the issue is that he is against a decentralization generally.

He opposes it for Signal.

And his arguments in favour of centralization are flawed. Sure, regular people do not want to run their own (email, chat, etc) servers. But they DO want to be able to chose from a handful of available servers the one they like best (or the one they trust most), without losing connectivity with their contacts. Tired of Google's shenanigans, move from Gmail to Protonmail, tell your contacts your new email, set up an autoresponder, all is fine. When you move away from a centralized silo like Signal, you'll have to move all your chat buddies with you to a new platform.

If you read the section "Recreating this world" it addresses this pretty directly

Directly, and not convincingly at all. He presents just one use case, which, coincidentally, is the only one that casts the service he runs in a really good light. There are other use cases, like several email users leaving Gmail altogether, escaping from what he calls "the worst of both worlds". And his alternative? Using the centralized service (preferrably, the one he runs), because, he promises, this one will be totally different, aha.

Some people say they want this, but in practice, why you should trust someone you've never heard of?

Network effects aside, consider the difficulty of deciding that the people behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are trustworthy. The average person doesn't have the knowledge to do due diligence, and many of us who could (in theory) don't want to bother.

How do you get to the point where people think your team of software developers is legitimate? Decisions like this are based on what everyone else is using.

One reason that app stores serving sandboxed apps are popular is that you don't have to evaluate each software developer's organization just to play their games.

> consider the difficulty of deciding that the people behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are trustworthy.

Yet web users did decide that the people behind Chrome were trustworthy, even when there were still sites claiming to "work best in Internet Explorer". You're arguing that something is unrealistic, and yet you give an example of that thing actually happening.

> The average person doesn't have the knowledge to do due diligence

The average person knows that Facebook is bad for society, and yet they are tied to the platform because of a lack of interoperability. A minority of users have accepted the switching cost and moved to Fediverse instances, but I think it's not controversial to suggest that more people would switch to Facebook competitors if they could stay in contact with their Facebook friends.

You might be interested in the refutation of some of those arguments by Daniel Gultsch: https://gultsch.de/objection.html

At least wrt Signal, I think he prefers the trust be in the protocol and not the organization or business model.

It seems that with Signal he actually prefers that people trust specifically the organization that he founded, and not compatible implementations of the protocol, or even self-built copies of the same binary.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/q1jnbb/why_isnt_sig...

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