Distributed Everything
While I do agree to some extent with this post, it is naive
in a lot of places. Forgive me if this comes across as
picking at the post, but I feel that some of these things
need to be said.<p><pre><code>  > You know the sources. You’re all on them. [...] Shitter.
</code></pre>
While Twitter is grouped with all of these others, I don't
find Twitter to be on the same level as Facebook or Google
Plus. Maybe it's just me, but I view it as a very large,
public forum/chat. (I guess I'm in minority here?) Chatting
on Freenode in a public channel isn't necessarily any more
private than Twitter.<p><pre><code>  > When you use these services, you’re not even a button
  > pushing Starbucks at Barista. You’re just ordering a
  > free latte at hypothetical ad-sponsored Starbucks of the
  > future. You’re not even pushing the button.You’re just a
  > user.
</code></pre>
This is misleading. People contributing to Medium are
<i>creating content</i>. They are not passively consuming content
via YouTube, or only posting ephemeral content via Twitter.
Just look at the post that you created. Sure it's published
via a 'central' service, but you are not a 'drone' just
regurgitating content or providing little to no value to
your readers. The real danger in centralized services is
when they eclipse everything else. The inflection point
where they become a blackhole, sucking everything else in
(e.g. long-form blog posts aren't read by a large audience
if they aren't on Medium) is the real danger.<p><pre><code>  > So, being that I wanted to continue to send more emails,
  > I stopped using the word Bitcoin in emails.
</code></pre>
The MailChimp/Tiny Letter issue is an issue of
centralization <i>caused</i> by the downsides of
decentralization. It becomes increasingly hard to deal with
email as the 'small guy' because:<p>1. You need to be a big guy to make any head-way with making
sure your emails are blacklisted by the 'big guys' (e.g.
Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail).<p>2. Email is hard because of the cat-and-mouse game that
email admins must play with spammers. If email was a
centralized service, spammers would probably be easier to
block. Decentralization is also a double-edged sword.<p>This leads to less competition in the email market because
it's a hassle that few people want to deal with when
deciding to start a new business.<p><pre><code>  > So as more and more people started using these services,
  > I noticed the level of the conversations around me
  > dropping closer to the kind of conversations people have
  > in kindergarten.
</code></pre>
Unfortunately this is what happens when you draw in more and
more of the general public. You can't solve this issue with
decentralization, unless your decentralized solution sets
the bar high enough that these people just choose not to
participate.<p><pre><code>  > You don’t accidentally end up inside someone’s public
  > furry porn collection
</code></pre>
Most people don't view accidentally stumbling into someone
else's furry porn collection as an upside. You're never
going to get many people to 'sign up'(1) for something like
this.<p>(1) I'm not talking about signing up for a centralized
service. Just 'signing up' as in joining in.<p><pre><code>  > You have no idea how to type HTML anymore. You have no
  > idea how to deploy a Node.js application. You have no
  > idea how to create a link to another website.
</code></pre>
If you ever think that the general public is going to want
to write HTML or deploy Node.js applications, then you have
another thing coming. This is like suggesting that everyone
should learn how to repair their car to avoid getting
screwed by shady mechanics. It doesn't hold up in the real
world. It might be nice, but it's a pipe dream.<p><pre><code>  > Don’t just log out. Delete your accounts. This will
  > force you to learn how to use the Internet the hard way.
</code></pre>
I appreciate the sentiment, but how many people has, "Go
start coding in Vim and disable the arrow keys to learn,"
convinced? And this is among the 'tech elite.' I don't
understand how you think that this is convincing argument
for the general public.<p><pre><code>  > Host your own web server. Get your own VPS (Digital
  > Ocean is only $5 a month) and host your own web server.
</code></pre>
First, the 'distributed vs. centralized' debate needs to
have terms defined. Sure, Facebook is definitely
centralized, and P2P is definitely decentralized, but what
about hosting your own server? It's more decentralized to
host your own server than something like Facebook, but the
government can still just ask your hosting provider for
access to your server without a warrant. So how has this
really helped us?<p>It's made it <i>harder</i> for the government to get access to
your data because data is now in lots of little silos rather
than a handful of huge ones, but it's still not the panacea
that it's presented as here.<p>To hook into the coffee shop analogy, Starbucks is like
Facebook, centralized. The stovetop expresso maker is more
like P2P in being decentralized. Hosting your own server?
That's more like renting an expresso maker at a
community-center. Technically you don't own the expresso
maker, even though you are renting/leasing it. At any time,
the expresso maker could be used be someone else if that's
what your lease agreement allows (e.g. hosting agreements
that are pretty open-ended with respect to cooperation with
law enforcement).<p><pre><code>  > Deploy using Node.js using Bitters.
</code></pre>
I'm not entirely sure why Node.js is constantly used as an
example. Is this somehow 'distributed' vs. Rails/Django
which are 'centralized?'<p><pre><code>  > Duckduckgo. The search engine that gets you out of your
  > filter bubble, and respects your privacy.
</code></pre>
Unfortunately there are a few issues here:<p>1. Duckduckgo is dependent on Yahoo! for its search data.
Sure, they aren't sending usage statistics back to Yahoo!
(so far as I know), but how free are we really from the
giant data silos when we are still connected to them for
things like search data. If usage of Duckduckgo ever got to
the point that it would be severely cutting into Google or
Yahoo!'s bottom-line, then the program would probably be
terminated.<p>2. Duckduckgo is good, but not at the same level of
functionality as the big players. Many people have attempted
to switch to DDG over the recent NSA revelations, only to
switch back to Google.<p>3. DDG doesn't scale. The 'solution' here seems to be to
have everyone switch from Bing/Google/Yahoo! to DDG. Then
DDG becomes the big silo and the NSA targets them instead.
What have we really won, then?<p>The only thing that DDG really does is increase competition
in the web search market, but if we are to attempt to hold
the web search engine market to the distributed ideal we are
discussing, then what we really need is something else.