Tag proposal: decentralization
42 points by cve
42 points by cve
Just now, I submitted a link for an upcoming decentralized chat protocol, polyproto.org.
While trying to select a tag, it felt a bit difficult.
In the end, I settled on networking and web but both feel slightly wrong because they don't cover the topic that is the coolest about it, namely the decentralization aspect.
In the past, there have been discussions about adding an ATProto, where @olegkovalov proposed a decentralization tag.
Sure, it might be a bit too generic, but I personally think that decentralization would make up a good tag because many such technologies build upon similar technologies and concepts, trying to solve similar problems: Identity management, handling spam, handling sybil attacks, handling authentication, ...
I think a tag called decentralization would be nice and could be applicable to various technologies:
Happy to hear feedback about it. 🙂
Decentralisation is my main interest in terms of development. I’d really welcome such tag.
I see people here being on the fence about using “decentralisation” as the identifier for this tag. Let me tell you folks that the communities working on this space refer to this kind of tech as decentralisation. This is the jargon in use by the people doing it.
ActivityPub and the fediverse are just one part of it. ATProto and bluesky are too. But there are many others such as secure scuttlebutt, hypercore, willow protocol, ipfs and friends… all these are part of decentralisation efforts that go from protocols all the way to apps. It is a whole ecosystem with thriving projects, different approaches and very interesting stuff happening.
Oh, I must have missed that.
Personally I consider distributed to mean more theoretical things, such as distributed algorithms, distributed systems, etc.
Maybe calling it distributed/decentralized could be a good compromise?
I didn't recognize "decentralization" to mean "taking back ownership from big tech". My immediate assumption was it meant something like database sharding or other distributed types of computing.
Is there a word to describe this that stands on its own instead of being defined as moving away from big company services like Github and Twitter? I'm thinking like how Python went with "free threading" instead of something like "GIL-less". I know "peer-to-peer" and "self-hosted" aren't exactly what you mean by "decentralized" but I think the tag would be more clear if, like those terms, it describes what it is, not what it isn't.
I'm in favor. Networking is too broad. Web is also broad but with a narrow overlap with decentralized. I agree with OP that distributed has more of a connotation of distributed architectures or algorithms, which can themselves (and I'd bet mostly do) serve systems that are more are less centralized from the outside: some Meta cluster somewhere is definitely running Raft, for example.
I like the idea enough.
I think the name could use a little bikeshedding but that's no reason to not go ahead with it. (Just maybe something shorter? "fedi"?)
I think "fedi" is too tied to the "fediverse" that is primarily just ActivityPub.
That is a good point you are making, ATProto is usually not considered to be fedi, although I do not really see a good reason why, because diaspora and ostatus are afaik. Potentially due to the commercial baking of ATProto that is absent in ActivityPub/OStatus/Diaspora?