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If you're like me, you probably often hear the word "decentralization" in various circles. It may or may not have become a buzzword in the world of software, thanks to crypto. This word has become very polarizing to me: whenever I hear it, I either love the idea, or I get bad vibes from it.
I'm starting to think that there are, in fact, two types of decentralization. This is going to be a ramble about very vague half-baked thoughts in my brain - in fact, I don't even have names for these two categories. We'll get to the question of naming them in a bit, but for now I'm just going to call them "Type 1" and "Type 2".
Disclaimer: this may or may not be a false dichotomy, treat this with a grain of salt, and so on.
If you're reading this on Gemini, then you've probably heard of these. This category includes:
Gemini
PeerTube
Smol websites hosted on random people's single-board computers
Pubnixes
Email, RSS
BitTorrent
The Gemini community might be less familiar with these, so I will provide links and short descriptions:
Mastodon - ActivityPub also makes me feel uneasy
Type 1 decentralization is older, while Type 2 is a modern development. Am I just a cranky boomer?
No, maybe I'm just happy when I know that there is a human on the other side of an Internet connection.
In general, type 1 decentralization means there is one free & open source exchange protocol, and then hundreds of implementations, with thousands of people hosting their own "nodes". In practice, this is very messy: some implementations are flawed and non-standard, nodes go offline simply because people get bored, or because there is an outage shutting down somebody's Raspberry Pi - this is very imperfect but also part of the charm. (you call it messy, I call it vibrant! And ungovernable!)
Type 2 decentralization relies on the invisible hand of the market. The end goal of these projects is that I should be able to create content, then publish it from my computer with a push of a button, at which point I can stop worrying about it as it's magically distributed to people, peer to peer.
The difference is that BitTorrent has cultivated a culture around it. When I watch videos I've acquired (*cough* why do I feel like coughing *cough*) via torrent, I feel a sense of obligation to seed them, otherwise I become a "leech" - and nobody likes a leech. The content is usually of high enough quality that I'm willing to spare some bandwidth and disk space for it.
Compare this to LBRY, where the incentives are not as clear - most people access the network via one web frontend, Odysee.com, which does not store content on your device. Even if you choose to do so, you'll find that storage space fills up rapidly with 1080p videos that you've watched a week ago, and which nobody cares about anymore, as the "LBRYian/YouTuber" probably created 7 more videos this week.
The whole thing is somewhat functional, LBRY Inc. stays afloat thanks to keeping a reserve of its own cryptocurrency, LBC, the same currency that rewards miners of the video metadata blockchain, and is also usable as a method of donating and supporting your favorite creators. The amount of moving parts here is astonishing, and a part of me is excited about this technology, and yet this feels like total overkill for a service that simply badly imitates YouTube. I've uploaded a few videos to LBRY, but I currently don't have LBRY installed on my machine, so I just have to pray that the content is floating around on someone else's device (or that nobody wants to access it)
I'd much prefer joining somebody's PeerTube instance. The instance will likely offer limited disk space, but the high cost reflects the very real scarcity of energy and hardware around the world, forcing you to think about the sustainability of the Internet without the dark-magic-moneyprinting ad industry. While the PeerTube instance is active, I will feel safe knowing that my work is accessible - if the instance is down, oh well, I'm sure the admin had good reasons for it.
This is the fun part. Let's come up with some new terms.
I've actually had the idea to write this post for a while now, and since then I've found that there are indeed proper terms for these things. In systems theory, "Type 1" systems are referred to as decentralized (many little servers), while "Type 2" systems are referred to as "distributed" (no servers at all, everybody is equal).
However, this distinction is vague enough that I missed it entirely until I started writing this. I always treated these words as synonyms. Maybe I'm just dumb. But there is another problem: these terms do not answer the question "why do decentralized systems feel good, while distributed systems feel bad?"
Eww, why do I even know these words?
This the best description for the way the two types of systems are treated.
The term 'Human decentralization' acknowledges that real work must be done by real humans in order to achieve a desired goal. The work may be playful and enjoyable, but it is still work, with the imperfect human factor behind it. It also shows that we can build beautiful systems while keeping the technology simple and understandable for people.
The term 'Handwave decentralization' just says "yeah, just publish it on the blockchain, it'll all work out somehow".
"Global-scale" is a value-neutral term, it can have a different connotation depending on your views on globalization.
If we're going to be nice to crypto bros, we have to acknowledge that *the idea* of moving beyond the human factor and towards a world which is both decentralized and convenient - that, at least in theory, is a good idea. I just can't imagine it happening the way they think it will.
-- gardenapple 2021-12-29
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