Comment on Welcome to the Post-Naive Internet Era

shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Criminal culture is decentralized, neo-Nazis are decentralized, power is decentralized.

  Decentralized doesn’t equal good. I mean, I agree, but also one should use things with the smallest possible effective difference between suggested main quality and “what if not”.

  That’s also why I’ve become skeptical of encryption lately. If one of your group members is compromised, it’s all compromised, doesn’t matter with how many member keys you encrypt each message, one is enough. In Signal they do that to conceal who’s a member of which group, and that is, of course, a noble endeavor. But see the previous paragraph. Either you expect one thing or the other. Either you are in a public group and have to watch your opsec and words, or you are in some cryptic conclave among trusted brethren. Except the latter is never true. Fringe of psychology and tech, as all security.

  It’s similar with decentralization. It’s just a trait. Whether you need it is defined by your goal.

  In my opinion it’s good when it’s real. Say, for the goal of countering bad market-driven phenomena in the Internet, - yes, it’s a real solution and it’s good when it works. For the goal of countering authoritarianism and surveillance it’s not, because it doesn’t solve the problem, in such a situation they can block and prosecute whoever they want and they will, and decentralization won’t work by itself.

  So, when it works. It works when it allows people making stuff to make money, and when that includes stuff making the whole system work. If such a decentralized set of tools had been already made, it would have already won by market means. Despite all the advertising bullshit, oligopoly and vendor locks.

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