Why are all services centralised? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Hello,

There are loads of people who dislike centralised services, like facebook, twitter, dropbox and so on, yet still no one seems to be very curious about decentralised systems. How come?

Lemmy scratches the surface with lots of centralised servers, but pushing it, everyone could have their own soft that, for example, is their "user". A user having "facebook"/twitter/dropbox/sharing capabilities. Still no one seems to even pursue those kind of ideas. Even in theory.

Is it because the dopamine triggering algorithm wins everyone over? The fear of using a soft that communicated on an open port on your device? Or what might it be? But that doesn't make sense to me, because people don't even discuss it. Or am I not invited to those discussions 😁?

It should be trivial to spin up a sharing system, for example (harboring laws would protect you), or some "friends, and friends friends only" network a la facebook in tje early days.

It's not limited by technology, and people are smart and curious.

So where are they?

Edit: I know that even if the service existed, most people wouldn't use it and prefer Facebook et al. But that absolutely nobody has spun up one is what baffles me. Thousands work on the Linux kernel, where are the hardcore network nerds?

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[-] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

No because I wouldn't have a big network. Say 50 people for the sake of example. They check in to see what I'm up to, and sees my "Super Message".

They might put it up on their phone, and the 72 people they have in their network can now see it, and they all can share it on and so forth, spreading it to millions of people if it continues.

But I only needed to share it with 50 people.

That's the power of truly decentralised systems.

[-] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago

Manual replication has it's own host of issues. You can read about the CAP theorem for more details. A decentralized system has good "partition tolerance" (so even if the government tries to crack down on one or two servers, the rest have copies of all the content), but bad consistency (people might have outdated copies of content). For example, if every user copies the content they want to share, what happens when the original post gets updated? Now the updates need to propagate. What happens if somebody comments on an outdated post, before the update reaches it? Should the comment get deleted?

This is a harder problem than most people realize.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 days ago

Yes it's a complex problem if you try to use it like a centralized system, who's got authority on data N ? Lemmy has to deal with that I guess.

But IMO it doesn't need to be made like that, you can have your data, and that's it. If I copy your post and publish it, it's now "mine". And so on.

If you invite me to yours and I invite you to mine, we can also interact, like having a discussion. Each of us having authority on our data.

[-] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

That can get clunky though. If I make a post, I want to see all comments on the post. I don't want to have to hunt down all copies of the post and read the comments on each copy.

You're talking about a fundamentally different user experience. Not just a change in underlying architecture.

Though there are ways to be more decentralized without manually replicating data. Like Nostr.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 days ago

Yes totally, it would be less dopamine triggers, and more "old web" style (or a completely new type, like everyone can have their radio channel or whatever).

I'm checking out Nostr atm, that might be exactly what I'm looking for, we'll see when I have had the time to sift through the info.

this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026

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