this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Technology

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I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That (beehaw.org)
submitted 3 weeks ago by remington@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Recently, I've been learning more about this subject. Today I came across the Decentralization Scoring System and it slapped me across the face.

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[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I think this scoring system is missing Language Support as an important aspect of decentralization.

Centralization happens not just through commercial hosting (centralization of ownership), but even through self-hosters being in relatively centralized locations, limited jurisdictions, etc: an app with 300 self-hosted instances all located in one city (or even just all within 5 Eyes countries) is much easier to shut down than an app with those 300 spread across the globe, and language support is important to help facilitate that level of decentralization.

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If we're talking takedown-resistance, we may need to enter the dark web realm:

  • Tor hidden sites are inherently hard to pinpoint
  • ZeroNet was an interesting project, seems to be abandoned
  • I2P is like Tor on steroids, can publish all sorts of services
  • IPFS is a decentralized P2P storage system (best/worst known for NFTs)
  • ~~FreeNet~~ Hyphanet is a 25+ years old distributed content system with limited support for services
  • FreeNet is... honestly, haven't seen a working example, but it sounds interesting?
  • Matrix... if they manage to get things under control
  • Nostr is a censorship-resistant distributed messaging system

Hosting distribution and localization varies, but they all have features to make it hard to pinpoint host and/or client locations.

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Takedown resistance is a natural consequence of decentralization, but it's not decentralization itself.

Technical means to evade takedown like you're describing also tend to add complexity which reduces usability, whereas language support reduces complexity for speakers of the supported languages.

I think this scoring system is a little haphazard, and should probably be divided into multiple separate, parallel scores. Takedown resistance needs its own score, based on ability to integrate with anonymization tools, ownership of codebase, accessibility and security of dependencies, etc.