Decent Decentralisation

https://berjon.com/decent-imaginaries/

Good counter to the focus on protocols.

> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol’s operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world **rides not only on liberation but also on organising**.

@fediverse

By @robin

  • poVoqA
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    5 months ago

    Making servers a commodity is a convenient illusion that cloud vendors invented for marketing purposes.

    To stay with the real-world metaphor: it is a bit like suburbs. They are sold on the illusion of individual freedom in your own home but with the required car ownership as the capture point and an endless list of negative externalities and expensive hidden infrastructure requirements making them entirely unsustainable.

    • Robin Berjon@mastodon.social
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      5 months ago

      @poVoq Cloud providers aren’t commodified, they’re not interoperable. You’re comparing a protocol with specific design to enable commodification with proprietary platforms. If you don’t understand the properties of ATProto that target that, your critiques are going to go well wide.

      • poVoqA
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        5 months ago

        True, but they are marketed as such, which is my point. Commodification is nearly always an illusion to vendor-lock or capture you in other ways you don’t suspect, which is exactly what ATProto seems to be designed for as well.

        • Robin Berjon@mastodon.social
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          5 months ago

          @poVoq Look, no offence but I’m almost at three decades working on web standards. I lost interest in people picking sides for one tech just for the sake of it a long time ago. Happy to discuss if you have better than vague and inaccurate analogies to unrelated tech or “seems to be” aspersions about documented architectures, but if not I’ll just get back to my weekend!