Upon 2020

Tag: Decentralized

  • Why decentralized social networking never makes it — ever heard of Crossing the Chasm?

    Every now and then, the “why hasn’t decentralized social networking succeeded” discussion pops back up. And inevitably, that motivates somebody who thinks they can do better. They proceed to design a new set of decentralized networking protocols, write lots of code, and get early adopters to enthusiastically adopt the New Thing. Which then, inevitably, never…

  • Help me articulate the value of user-centricity, privacy etc

    Even after all these years working on user-centric identity, privacy-protecting technologies, open source, code in the hands of the user instead of the overlord … I’m still struggling with articulating the value succinctly. Case in point. I’m going through the strategic marketing exercise of describing for whom these kinds of products/technologies/services are, and what unmet…

  • Trying out IPFS — it was easy

    Sitting at the decentralized web summit today, there’s lots of talk about IPFS. So I played with it while they were talking. It was much simpler to set up than I thought. Here are my steps: I run Arch Linux (in VirtualBox, on my Mac) pacman -S ipfs-go ipfs daemon & Created a file called…

  • Why Decentralized Software Is 10x Harder

    The Diaspora* guys announced today: Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community. which has widely been interpreted as giving up on the grand vision of decentralized social networking. The remaining Diaspora team apparently (I’d guess based on advice they got from YCombinator) will focus on a more standard “we run an ad-supported…