Re: [decentralization] The decline of P2P and Decentralisation
I've been thinking of it like viscosity. So the issue isn't how
decentralized the web-based systems are but how long it takes the
overal landscape to change from one shape to another.
On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, Julian Bond wrote:
> Whatever happened to P2P and Decentralisation as a design pattern?
>
> Wordpress and Movable type became Myspace and Facebook.
>
> RSS became Google Reader
>
> Distributed email servers and desktop clients have become Google Mail
>
> Posting a Quicktime file on your site has become YouTube
>
> Running your own shoutcast server has become Last.FM tag radio
>
> IRC has become Twitter
>
> This post was prompted by Twitter and Twitter's success. If you were
> going to design this from scratch knowing what they know now, would you
> really use a pull architecture, centralised web system and Ruby on
> Rails?
>
> Did we all forget about Decentralisation or has the pendulum just swung
> out to the opposite end and is due to swing back any time now?
>
> ps. I know those questions are strawmen and the truth is that (almost)
> everything that has ever happened is still happening.
Whatever happened to P2P and Decentralisation as a design pattern? Wordpress and Movable type became Myspace and Facebook. RSS became Google Reader Distributed...
I've been thinking of it like viscosity. So the issue isn't how decentralized the web-based systems are but how long it takes the overal landscape to change...
Thanks Julian for reminding me this group still exists. I think Decentralisation was great - in theory - in practice most of the apps were unreliable, and so...
Mitra <mitra.ardron@...> Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:14:59 ... Shades of grey. There were very very few systems that were ever completely p2p and decentralised....
I find it interesting that these questions come from the webmaster for the "facebook for sales managers" of ecademy ;) Surely just from your own experience...
Oh, I don't know: P2P for communication is doing just fine: look at Skype and the emerging efforts in the IETF to define a P2P version of SIP. There are...
Totally agreed Rob. These systems are never labeled as p2p precisely because they work so well. Without SIP and similar/associated protocols, most VoIP...
Hi Julian Essentially they all were swallowed up and developed after being "corporatised" / made proprietary. Which raises the old chestnut about the inability...
... a few thoughts that have been kicking around in the back of my brain for a while: - from an end user perspective, the hosted software is very appealing: ...
Decentralized systems are much harder to design. ("costs more in time and money to get to equivalent features") Decentralized systems are much harder to debug....
... J> ... But putting some of the function out on the edge where it J> took advantage of CPU and bandwidth was a good thing. As was J> letting anyone and...
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@...> Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:27:05 ... I wasn't thinking of servers at home. But that anyone with a bit of hosting can run a...
... That's interesting - is there anything lost if your personal server/agent is hosted outside your physical home (ala Amazon's EC2)? This obviously is a ...
Hasn't decentralization become corporatized? I'm thinking of the increasing number of "widget" vendors and platforms. Sure - this isn't P2P, but the ability to...
I think that the consensus vision of what decentralization means was a little too literal. People thought that it was always going to be about PC-based...
Good point. REST definitely is about decentralized control - multiple organizations interacting without arduous up-front coordination. It's an enabling...
... Decentralized systems are also much, much harder to "monetize", to exploit the crowd of users to the unique advantage of one company, since nearly by ...
Brian Behlendorf
brian@...
Apr 30, 2007 6:41 am
... I was thinking about Google, in relation to this thread: they're interesting, because they have three separate topologies at work -- in front of the...
Clay Shirky <clay@...> Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:25:55 ... Skype is throwing up some issues here. Because the bulk of the system is decentralised it's very...
... I'll side with Adam on this one. Funny how everything is happening at the same time: yesterday we were having a San Francisco P2P get-together, and Travis...
... As the resident Behlendorfian, I'll reply that neither Brian nor I are saying it is "unnecessary.' For my part, I'm saying a) that much of the predicted...
Clay Shirky <clay@...> Wed, 2 May 2007 10:30:43 ... As always there are shades of grey here. Drupal and phpBB have done wonders for democratising the...
... Sure, they are powerful and democratizing, but Drupal and phpBB don't use decentralized topologies. In fact, they're pretty good illustrations of what...
... Not sure what exactly do you mean by that, but it sounds suspiciously like what CompuServe executive might have said about the Web in the early nineties -...
... No, I mean it as a historical observation. It is observably the case that there are fewer P2P apps in wide use than we predicted would be in circulation,...
Clay Shirky <clay@...> Wed, 2 May 2007 14:03:15 ... Now there's a statement to conjure with and de-construct. From the implied ageism to the influence...
... It's not implied ageism -- its just ageism. (And it's certainly not about VCs.) Young people are a different kind of barometer of the possible than older...
No question you're right, Clay, that people are building far more frequently from the LAMP stack these days than anything else. The decline of p2p doesn't...
... Well, just to present a counterpoint... there are an awful lot of things that have been done successfully in the computer field, promptly forgotten, and...
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