What Decentralization is Going to Require

Decentralization. It’s not just a hip happnin’ buzzword. And it’s not just for blockchain. It has been important, and it always has been—I was using it back in 2005 to describe the early Wikipedia—because it uses technology to guarantee, or at least safeguard, freedom. It removes control of public conversations from the hands of would-be overseers of the digital plantations.

Here are the principles that “decentralization” encodes:

  1. Self-ownership. Each user owns his own identity in the network.
  2. Data ownership. You own your own data; you control your own data, within the bounds of controlling law.
  3. Platform-independent following. You control your friend/follower list independently of all platforms. Hence, once a friend follows you on one platform, he should follow you forever everywhere until he unfollows you or you block him (or there is a lawful government order compelling a change).
  4. Platform-agnostic posting. Posting on one platform means posting the same thing on all platforms that are part of one big decentralized network.
  5. Decentralized moderation. Content moderation, which is ultimately an absolute requirement, cannot be performed by a single, central, controlling body or system, providing identical outcomes. So it, too, must be decentralized.
  6. Single conversation. Therefore, there is one giant integrated conversation, but parts of are not shown to people who don’t want to see it (or in places it’s literally illegal). Of course, it is still legal for people to run closed, walled gardens; but they’re not for general broadcast.
  7. Anti-monopoly. Therefore, also, no corporation has anything like a monopoly over the means of social media broadcasting, as at present.

There are several requirements that, I believe, are absolutely required of the alternative social media platforms to satisfy these principles:

  1. User exportability. Platforms should permit users to export a complete and unadulterated copy of their user data from the platform and host it elsewhere. Moreover, public user data that is edited by the user in one place must be brought current with all other copies made elsewhere as well, in a timely fashion.
  2. Data exportability. The user’s data must be easily exportable in a common, easily machine-readable format, according to a widely-used standard. This is an absolute minimum. Not many actually support this yet. This isn’t enough, though, because you need to be able to export your followers, too, and to do that:
  3. Interoperability. The social media platform must be made as interoperable as possible (at the user’s option). So I should be able to subscribe and follow someone who is posting on his own blog, or Mastodon, or Gab, or Parler. I should be able to post and read from any of these networks, and the data should appear in a timely fashion in all the rest.
  4. Data inalienability. If the user’s data is not actually served from outside of a platform—which should be possible—then it is treated by the platform as if it were. The platform is merely holding the data on behalf of the user, as a service. The platform must not treat the data as “theirs.” This is still a rather vague requirement, but it has specific consequences. One of them would be that the platform is absolutely not permitted to delete or edit a post from your data, although they can of course opt not to post it on the platform. Twitter and Facebook violate this principle when they fail to retain copies of posts that they delete.

Those are things I feel confident of, as a bare minimum. There are other things that really also need to be part of it, I suspect:

  1. Moderation. Individual users, or whole platforms (if users should wish to use them), should be able to select their own moderators. Moderation data, or metadata—such as that a certain user should be blocked, or that a certain post should be hidden or flagged in some way—should be shared in a way similar to how the user data and content itself is served (so, across the network in a decentralized way), and independently of the user’s canonical copy of the data.
  2. Text representation. The user’s public data must be syndicated in a lo-tech text-based (more human-friendly) format such as JSON or XML, even if they have an API (maybe I don’t want to be forced to use their API, maybe because it’s too restrictive). The purpose of this is to enable the user to more easily exert control over the source or original version of his own tweets. This text stream, if it still exists and the author’s control can be proven, becomes the user’s personal assertion or attestation as to how the state of his personal feed should be represented; this human-friendly data representation of the content becomes the controlling, “canonical” version of the data. No other representation, in no other data medium (blockchain, IPFS, bittorrent, or otherwise), is to be regarded legally or operationally as “the canonical version.”
  3. Permanence (or uncensorability). By network policy, the user’s public data must also be able to be made available forever (so a particular platform couldn’t delete it on behalf of everyone else, even if they wanted to) via bittorrent or IPFS or the like. Maybe the blockchain is OK, but frankly due to the financial complexities involved in blockchain, I don’t trust blockchains as bittorrent-type “decentralized public cloud” storage.

Something like that. This is not a complete set of “decentralization requirements.” It is merely an attempt to articulate some of the basic requirements, including many that current attempts at decentralization have failed to deliver on.

If you put all such things together, then you’ve operationalized the vague principles of decentralization for social media. The more that existing social media platforms actually implement these features, the more social media will actually be decentralized.


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13 responses to “What Decentralization is Going to Require”

  1. I don’t have enough technological knowledge to cover his points precisely, but i will do it how i understand them, but I encourage that anyone who knows more to make a post or add it to the comments.

    I will try to do it in lamer language because i don’t know all the terminology (and English is my 3. language)

    I. Self-ownership. Each user owns his own identity in the network.

    (if owning your private keys means you own your BTC wallet, Owning Hive Keys means you own your Account on Hive)

    II. Data ownership. You own your own data; you control your own data, within the bounds of controlling law.

    (all text is written on the chain (not really sure how hivemind works) and only owner of the keys can edit text that he has written (all edits are visible on chain))

    III. Platform-independent following. You control your friend/follower list independently of all platforms. Hene, once a friend follows you on one platform, he should follow you forever everywhere until he unfollows you or you block him (or there is a lawful government order compelling a change).

    (friend/follower list is written on the chain and is independent of all platforms (frontends). So people that follow me on hive.blog also follow me on peakd and escency and dapplr and they will follow me on a front end that i decide to build from opensource code.

    IV. Platform-agnostic posting. Posting on one platform means posting the same thing on all platforms that are part of one big decentralized network.

    (posting on peakd is seen on hive.blog, dapplr, escency and all other frontends that are not community specific. community specific platforms like leofinance show all posts posted on peakd that have a community specific tag)

    V. Decentralized moderation. Content moderation, which is ultimately an absolute requirement, cannot be performed by a single, central, controlling body or system, providing identical outcomes. So it, too, must be decentralized.

    (every frontend can moderate how they wish but there is no centralized moderation. so if peakd decides that it does not want to show something it will still be visible on dapplr. or any other frontend (there is an option to build one from opensource code))

    VI.Single conversation. Therefore, there is one giant integrated conversation, but parts of are not shown to people who don’t want to see it (or in places it’s literally illegal). Of course, it is still legal for people to run closed, walled gardens; but they’re not for general broadcast.

    (as i wrote every frontend can show all data, but also can show only data that it decides to. Communities and tribes can have their own frontend that shows only specific data and ignore everything else. on some frontends user can decide that he can block some tags. user can also mute (he will not see) some users.)

    VII Anti-monopoly. Therefore, also, no corporation has anything like a monopoly over the means of social media broadcasting, as at present.

    (i am not sure what is the number of frontends that show all the data, more than 5 for sure, and big number of topic specific frontends. over 100 witnesses running the code and 15 Api Nodes (everyone can run one if they want))

    There are several requirements that, I believe, are absolutely required of the alternative social media platforms to satisfy these principles:

    1. User exportability. Platforms should permit users to export a complete and unadulterated copy of their user data from the platform and host it elsewhere. Moreover, public user data that is edited by the user in one place must be brought current with all other copies made elsewhere as well, in a timely fashion.

    (every user can export complete and unadulterated copy of their data to their own frontend build from opensource code or build by them from scratch. All data edited on users frontend are edited on all other frontends. here the problem could be that no data can be deleted from the chain (frontends can decide to not show it, but can’t be deleted)

    2. Data exportability. The user’s data must be easily exportable in a common, easily machine-readable format, according to a widely-used standard. This is an absolute minimum. Not many actually support this yet. This isn’t enough, though, because you need to be able to export your followers, too, and to do that:

    (ease of exportability is pretty dependent on knowledge of the user that is trying to do so. but there are some apps that are working on it. There is an wordpress addon that connects your wordpress site with hive. Travelfeed front is developing (it is functional) a few clicks option to make your personal blog from your posts on Hive. So with few clicks and options of what you want to show and how to show it you can have a personal blog connected to your Hive account. Making posts on any Hive frontend with a travelfeed tag will also automatically add it to your personal blog)

    3. Interoperability. The social media platform must be made as interoperable as possible (at the user’s option). So I should be able to subscribe and follow someone who is posting on his own blog, or Mastodon, or Gab, or Parler. I should be able to post and read from any of these networks, and the data should appear in a timely fashion in all the rest.

    (this one is tricky because other platforms have nothing to do with hive. using data of other platforms would probably not go well. but few frontends are making an option to write on Hive and posts are also shown on users Twitter. Connecting it to every and all would be a hard job)

    4. Data inalienability. If the user’s data is not actually served from outside of a platform—which should be possible—then it is treated by the platform as if it were. The platform is merely holding the data on behalf of the user, as a service. The platform must not treat the data as “theirs.” This is still a rather vague requirement, but it has specific consequences. One of them would be that the platform is absolutely not permitted to delete or edit a post from your data, although they can of course opt not to post it on the platform. Twitter and Facebook violate this principle when they fail to retain copies of posts that they delete.

    (Hive is merely holding the data and can’t edit it or delete it. biggest issue here is that data can’t be deleted)

    Those are things I feel confident of, as a bare minimum. There are other things that really also need to be part of it, I suspect:

    5. Moderation. Individual users, or whole platforms (if users should wish to use them), should be able to select their own moderators. Moderation data, or metadata—such as that a certain user should be blocked, or that a certain post should be hidden or flagged in some way—should be shared in a way similar to how the user data and content itself is served (so, across the network in a decentralized way), and independently of the user’s canonical copy of the data.

    (every front end can decide on their own what to show and what not to show. on some frontends every user has an option to add tags that he does not want to see on that front end. there is a mute function that user can use to mute other users for himself.)

    5.Text representation. The user’s public data must be syndicated in a lo-tech text-based (more human-friendly) format such as JSON or XML, even if they have an API (maybe I don’t want to be forced to use their API, maybe because it’s too restrictive).

    ( this is a bit to technical for me, but Hive stores text, uses JSONs and everyone can run an API node, so if someone does not like all the other nodes that are running, he can run his own. as i said this is a bit over my knowledge to be able to say it with 100%)

    6.Permanence. By network policy, the user’s public data must also be able to be made available forever (so a particular platform couldn’t delete it, even if they wanted to) via bittorrent or IPFS or the like.

    ( the text data is there forever, or as long at least one person is willing to run the witness servers. photo and video data is still stored on centralized servers. 3speak (hive based video platform) is in final stages of making desktop program that will host video and photos on IPFS and they clamed that everyone would be able to do it with few clicks)*

    This is my take on it, it is a bit non technical, and i know i doubled on points because it was easier for me to try to answer all of them. it is probably not the best read for technical people so i encourage someone to do it better.

  2. bil.prag

    lost some formatting while copying the text from my blog 🙁

    Sorry it will be a bit harder to read.

  3. Well-said, Larry. Only one little quibble. I would only tweak the wording to remove “user.” People own their data. There are readers and writers, too.

    “Only two industries refer to their customers as ‘users’: computer design and drug dealing.” – Edward Tufte

  4. […] Alkuperäinen artikkeli What Decentralization Requires↩︎ […]

    1. Neat—the above, in Finnish!

  5. […] Previous What Decentralization Requires – Larry Sanger Blog Read more… […]

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  7. James B.

    Check out Urbit. It’s the future of the internet. It makes Google, Facebook, AWS, Twitter, etc. completely irrelevant and obsolete.

  8. c1776

    Nice article. I would also add strong encryption for all data using user generated private keys. Not encryption using some company’s keys which is meaningless. Not encryption with backdoors. Everything encrypted.

    1. cr1776

      I’ll also reply to myself, things like p2p dns (e.g. namecoin/.bit), bitcoin (and some other crypto), twister (p2p twitter) etc are critical. No centralized points to be censored or controlled.

  9. Roger Rogers

    It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. I’m a half-full type guy.

    We are on the edge of a revolution that, though built on the foundation of previous revolutions (information, etc), will potentially be more impactful in affecting major societal change. Read the prescient George Gilder.

    This post resonates with the thinking of many. A previously esoteric concept now begins to coalesce into a collective epiphany. As this post’s author recognizes, the Gabs and Parlers will never do, for, however well meaning they might be, these are just other networks controlled by different overlords.

    Decentralization is key. However, the focus needs to be at least one layer of abstraction more fundamental. Rather than focusing on a particular end requirement, e.g. social share/interaction, “What decentralization requires”:

    – Decentralized data persistence/data store
    – Decentralized processing
    – Decentralized network connection
    – Decentralized power supply (?)
    – Decentralized payment (blockchain currencies)

    Everything else can be built upon/with this, including decentralized social share/interaction.

    There are latent ways to achieve this, with some obvious hinderances to be overcome. But, when this happens. To my thinking, Google, FB, etc are already walking dead. Just a matter of time, and the timeline is compressing exponentially.

    Where there’s a will there’s a way. Hedge fund managers start hedging (against, for it will become hard to profit off of the person in the future).

  10. community_man

    The key to all this is people paying each other for value created who know each other and love doing what they are doing. This will require creating an alternative to the defunct money distribution system, and no, it will not be Bitcoin, or any other fake decentralized system with a client/server wrapper. 🙂

    It will be an application with built in too big to fail safeguards, is fungible, and is used by community members that use it for “jail break” as the first step.

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