Encryption is awful for future archeologists etc.
What a weird take. The internet was built fundamentally decentralized but was centralized against us with the worst of intentions. They lost me at the first sentence.
University email, FTP, and terminal server.
The Internet is just a highway. You will end up at a destination.
Email protocol suite is designed to be federated. FTP is just a file system access protocol. But you could combine it with an inter-server filesystem synchronization protocol/service to make it a distributed federated service. And as for terminal servers,.. well, I don't think centralization makes much sense there. How can you achieve any of these with centralized services?
Again i talk about the past when email was primarily used to talk to other peoples often not even over a net but inside a mainframe thing.
I though i was clear talking about the past hence not including Facebook or GitHub, and btw. Email just became "federated" when everyone agreed to use smtp when talking over the internet.
Humans hate friction, they don't want to pay for maintenance and have short term thinking.
Even on HN there are plenty of voices saying they won't even bother using firefox because it inconvenience them.
Can we blame then the normies for choosing integrated easy systems to use?
It's partially our own failure to be loud enough and get them the information they need.
With that logic everyone would use the Edge-Browser right? Don't underestimate the "normie" ;)
The only reason we are not all using edge is because google spend billions marketing Chrome in early 2000. They got the normies with brute forcing, because they could make money with it, not for making the world better.
Heck, they promoted google on the HOME PAGE of google search, an ad spot you can't even buy from google, with a pseudo notification, a format google uses for nothing else in ads.
They went full throttle.
But nobody is going to spend millions to promote decentralization. Because it's about concentrating less power.
HN has always been terrible at undertanding that, because while they argue about what browser to use, the average user can barely make the difference between an app and a website anyway.
Are you talking about Netscape? Because that was installed on everything ;)
>because google spend billions marketing Chrome in early 2000
Really? Early 2000?
The antimatter algorithm allows peers to learn where the rest of the network has caught up to, without a central actor, or relying on consensus, across arbitrary P2P connection & disconnection events in the network. It even allows subnetworks, after a partition, to prune the history that they generate while partitioned, while still holding onto the necessary older history to reconnect with the other half of the partition.