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   arcanicanis (arcanicanis@were.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 01:42:33 JST arcanicanis

   in reply to

   The reason I think ‘federated’ has much more practicality, is because it’s far easier to conceptualize, establish responsibility of who pays the bills for running the servers, easier to locate a resource (if it uses some conventional identifier, like a URL), etc.

   Whereas with “truly decentralized mesh, everything is a node, no distinction of client/server”: usually some entity still has to pick up the slack and host high-bandwidth/high-uptime nodes, or seed a sizable portion of the network (if storage focused), or centrally run some ‘jumpstart’ servers (to be a new node’s first peer, to discover the rest of the network to peer with) for the network, entirely as some cash-furnace charity.

   As it is with Tor, I have no idea where it’d be if it was without a few of it’s top exit node providers, since there’s virtually no incentive to ever host an exit node: https://metrics.torproject.org/bubbles.html#as-exits-only

   The only model that I think anything ‘truly decentralized’ would be self-sustaining is if it involves some autonomous cryptocurrency-based concept, but that also adds more cost and overhead (including blockchain, consensus, etc), and I assume also difficult to design a system that provably measures resource costs (such as rewarding someone for hosting a resource, providing bandwidth, etc).

   It feels like everyone always tiers the concepts strictly into (from worst to inherently best): centralized, federated, decentralized mesh; always striving decentralized mesh as ‘the Holy Grail’, always better above-all. It’s seldom viewed instead where there’s tradeoffs between federated and decentralized.

   Also instead of having to combine decentralization all into one application protocol, sometimes it’s better just being left as an external responsibility of an underlying network; in other words, just take what we already have, and combine them together: host a single-user fedi instance on Tor, I2P, or some other overlay encrypted meshnet, and you get some of the bonuses without having to invent a whole new protocol and whole new suite of cross-platform client/node software (which can take YEARS to iron out).