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maegul @hachyderm.io
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Decent Decentralisation

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

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19 comments

  • This text has some good thoughts, but it fails to conceal the authors apparent dislike of the ActivityPub model that recognizes instance infrastructure as part of the community over the BlueSky model that has a gaping blind-spot there.

    As a result the article barely looks into instance level efforts for democratic governance and rather treats the infrastructure as some nebulous existing quality on which users can interact with each other and cooperate.

    The cynic in me thinks this blind-spot is intentional in the communication around Bluesky and its proponents, as it allows the owners of the necessary (cloud) infrastructure to retain a hidden power over its users.

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    • @poVoq Agreed. It got me thinking. But feels almost entirely ideological, conflating social media (e.g. Twitter, Reddit) with “the digital world”.

      Saying git is a “failed attempt at decentralisation” just because GitHub is popular misses that GitHub is less critical infrastructure than it would be if we only had CVS or Subversion.

      I’m encouraged by incremental, practical decentralisation efforts outside of social media. It’s slow, kinda boring but it’s real and happening today.

      @fediverse

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    • @poVoq

      Perhaps a totally fair critique.

      But for me the instance node in the Fedi binds many things together however much their governance aims to be democratic: username, platform, defed policies, moderation, user data (ie posts).

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      • @maegul @poVoq I'm well aware of democratic work at the instance level, I just don't think that it's the right granularity and I don't see how it doesn't get captured. I'm interested in solutions that work even for people who use Gmail.

        I don't understand the Bluesky comment, it doesn't sound related to anything I've said or even to reality?

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  • @maegul @fediverse Thanks @robin for the term "Google Search Fallacy"! I've been seeing variations upon it everywhere ...

    Love this article!

    (I've toyed with decentralized search before & quickly came to the conclusion that the way we commonly think about it is thoroughly misguided)

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  • @maegul @fediverse @robin This is a great summary:

    > failing to build the cooperation layer leads right back to capture no matter how good the tool. That's why git is simultaneously an extremely successful self-certifying system and a failed attempt at decentralisation.

    💯

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