Decent Decentralisation

https://berjon.com/decent-imaginaries/

Good counter to the focus on protocols.

> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol’s operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world **rides not only on liberation but also on organising**.

@fediverse

By @robin

  • Robin Berjon@mastodon.social
    0·
    10 months ago

    @poVoq I used to think that treating the server as a cityish thing made best sense. But cities are dense, they are used for everything including many things we often don’t think about (see Jacobs, etc.). The mapping doesn’t work very well, except perhaps for people who are very much in one community rather than overlapping ones.

    The ATProto approach is credible exit and all the properties that make servers into commodities. It means that you have better flexibility in dealing with infra.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
      1·
      10 months ago

      Federation solves that issue as it allows server inhabitants to “shop” for all their multiple needs by visiting other servers.

    • Robin Berjon@mastodon.social
      0·
      10 months ago

      @poVoq For instance, I think it would make *a lot* of sense to manage PDS infra with coops the way it’s done in plenty of places for energy provision. Things become a lot harder to manage when the people who are good at providing a commodity *also* have to be good at CoMo. For completely different topics. In completely different languages. Etc. Decoupling really helps here.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.net
        2·
        10 months ago

        Usually that decoupling already takes place on the level of VPS providers who are really good at providing a commodity service, but personally I think it is in the best interest of any slightly larger community to run their own hardware servers.

        Yes it takes some effort to do so, but only when running your own servers can democratic governance of an instance really work, otherwise you are always beholden to various limitations of the VPS provider and its pricing structure.