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**.
By @robin
@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?
You can’t realistically separate a instance from its users, just like you can’t separate a city (and its governance) from its inhabitants. This atomicity is a result of the real world infrastructure imposing itself on virtual communities. You can argue about “right granularity” all you want in that regard, but in result it just obfuscates where the “capture” happens and likely not for the better (as in the case of BlueSky).
@poVoq Except that there is no *necessary* requirement to reproduce the constraints of IRL infrastructure specifically at that location. A good question is why pick a server instead of, say, people who use the same undersea cable? Typically that’s because cables are a commodity whereas servers provide a single point of capture. But there are two options: make the server democratic or make the server a commodity (a real one, with no power and near-zero switching costs).
@poVoq I used to think that treating the server as a cityish thing made best sense. But cities are dense, they are used for everything including many things we often don’t think about (see Jacobs, etc.). The mapping doesn’t work very well, except perhaps for people who are very much in one community rather than overlapping ones.
The ATProto approach is credible exit and all the properties that make servers into commodities. It means that you have better flexibility in dealing with infra.
Making servers a commodity is a convenient illusion that cloud vendors invented for marketing purposes.
To stay with the real-world metaphor: it is a bit like suburbs. They are sold on the illusion of individual freedom in your own home but with the required car ownership as the capture point and an endless list of negative externalities and expensive hidden infrastructure requirements making them entirely unsustainable.
