Re: Are there 2 types of decentralization?

gardenappl wrote about how they perceive "decentralisation" and the different meanings of the word.

I wholeheartedly agree that the word "decentralisation" is used to refer to too many different architectures. The division into decentralised and distributed was new to me; since reading about different attempts at decentralising social media I've come across another division/definition.

Federated vs Decentralised

In this interpretation the decentralised system is one that has single individuals as actors where each individual has the ability (at least in theory) to take an equal part in the system. Things like bittorrent, IPFS, hypercore (formerly dat), blockchain, and individuals hosting their own content on the web/gopherspace/geminispace.

A federated system, by contrast, is a system that is theoretically decentralised but in practice is dependent on shared nodes. Consider everyone running their own mastodon instance vs some people running instances with several users. The former would be decentralised while the latter is federated. Email is one of these too; because so very few people run their own email servers it's effectively federated.

An interesting conflict of definitions here is the fact that many people running their own instances of things are actually running them on virtual servers, depending on a central service. The instances themselves may be decentralised or federated, but the hardware so to speak is deeply tied to a specific provider. Of course, if Digital Ocean goes down it won't take all of the fediverse with it, but probably a noticeable portion.

Distributed?

I do wonder at this term. From computer science studies I've learned that distributed is something being spread out over a number of nodes. That is, a central service such as a compute cluster actually consisting of thousands of computers all over the world. The typical distributed service would be a botnet or the academic networks of connected super computers, in which each node carries out an isolated task or computation which is essentially a part of a larger shared workload.

Definitions are hard...

-- CC0 ew0k, 2021-12-29