Rethinking the road to decentralisation

[rich]

@tomaka

When answering questions such as “why is there no good decentralized alternative Twitter or Reddit”, or “why is there no good decentralized alternative to Discourse”, and in general “why is there no ?” the answer almost always boils down to: because we haven’t found a good solution to the data storage/availability problem.

In other words, we (as in the blockchain ecosystem in general) haven’t found a good way to store data “somewhere” and being sure to be able to retrieve it later. IPFS for example doesn’t guarantee that you’ll retrieve it later, and Filecoin last time I’ve checked doesn’t really work and has oriented itself towards cold storage anyway.

I completely agree with you that the current ‘crypto industry’ has failed to solve this problem, however this ‘issue’ begins with an important assumption data availability in the context of ‘decentralised social networks’ is a problem that blockchains are suitable to solve.

@tomaka

We’ve had 5 years of high market cap where tens of billions flooded the blockchain ecosystem. If this proved anything, it’s that incentivizations and money alone don’t solve problems.

I would counter, that they are fundamentally not. And that this really roots us deeper into the reasons for practically adoption in crypto to date - and that is the product is the token, not the service.

Not everything needs a token, but speculative investment schemes wrapped up in the promise of new technologies do.

The answer to the data availability problem has been solved, not by blockchains but through federated models such as the Fediverse and Decred’s Bison Relay which begin by thinking through the issues of ‘decentralised social networking’ without trying to force a blockchain and a token into the mix.

There’s no center of the Fediverse. Each participant and each server has their own agenda, operating principles, and local data store. - Is Your Future Distributed? Welcome to the Fediverse.

Who Is “Web3” For? - Strange Matters

a decentralized, federated social network is flourishing which is built within a protocol that does not require blockchain, and does not convert every human interaction into a financial transaction. It focuses on communities and building useful, thoughtful, safe tools, instead of fetishizing buzzwords and pitching free speech absolutism in order to sell snake oil.

The Fediverse is built around a standardized protocol (ActivityPub) with a number of independent but compatible implementations, client apps, and thousands of instances run by individuals and communities. In other words, it fully realizes the “protocols, not platforms” idea.

There are no tokens to invest in. There is no cryptocurrency to “hodl.” No blocks to mine or validate and no blockchain to grow.

image from Is Your Future Distributed? Welcome to the Fediverse.

@rich

With the re-emergence of consumer hardware products such as… Urbit’s Native Planet bringing more aesthetically pleasing home servers closer to reality, we can see that the whole industry is re-converging on a familiar go-to-market that attempts to square the circle of credible decentralisation and good user experience.

The starting assumption this post begins with (though I should have been more explicit) is that you cannot solve social networking incentives with a token based protocol - but you can use blockchain based ‘funding models’ to sustain and advance a fully open source software and hardware stack, with the data availability problem addressed by the fact that each collective stores its own data and each member of the collective can own hardware that enables them to be a peer / mirror in their local network.

I would contend that 99% of the projects in the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem are right in their identification of core issues, but wrong in their approach to addressing them - they do not need a blockchain, they do not need a token, but the financial incentives encourage this.

See the Kabocha roadmap:

For us, the foundation is simple and perhaps more in keeping with the original ambitions of Bitcoin, Decred and other projects that that attempted to become sovereign non-state money. Unlike Bitcoin, but like Decred, we have the ability to fund contributions from a borderless work force, via on-chain governance and community proposals.

Our general thesis is that most current parachains on Kusama and Polkadot will fail owing to a lack of core focus and value capture, or be hamstrung by regulation within a few years owing to their centralised distributions and inability to function without a lead team.

So in reality, we are aiming to build a full stack open source OS, hardware and media, with a very limited use of blockchain and tokens, utilising them for some specific part of the process related to funding and value accrual to a network reserve.