Busy week coding -- but there was one delightful article that led me down a small rabbit hole of Richard P Gabriel's writing about "worse is better" from 1989/90. The hub for this idea is here: Richard P. Gabriel: "Worse Is Better", https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html And I found it via: Christine Lemmer-Webber: "How decentralized is Bluesky really?", 2024-11-22, https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ The idea of "worse is better" got connected to Gall's Law, and loosely relates to why idealistic, big software rewrites fail so often. And why things that are imperfect but provide value proliferate.

beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable.

the Chinese and the 00:58:35 ancient Hebrews I mean if if those of us who call ourselves Christians were actually had spent more time not reading the Old Testament in English but understanding the thought patterns in 00:58:48 Hebrew behind English which is a whole different story we would find that that Hebrew patterns of thought and Chinese patterns of thought are remarkably similar which suggests that it's not about 00:59:01 eastern western it's it's it's about a time shift that if you go back four or five thousand years you find lots of people who are thinking in relational terms 00:59:14 and in small group terms

Instead of centralized services, which, Dorsey now regrets creating with Twitter, it's distributed so that anyone can build an interface to display the data and activity flowing underneath. It's also designed so that your identity and information is easily transferable to any other platform that supports the protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol).

It funds those with ideas to fix the internet.

“But our everyday reality using the computer does not feel empowering. You want to use the internet without being tracked? Almost impossible. Want to message a friend? I hope you have read and agree to the WhatsApp Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Want to install some software on your Apple device? It better be in the App Store. Perhaps you want to lend an Amazon eBook to your sister? Well you don’t actually own it, so you’ll have to ask Amazon.”

In many ways, mail server stacks represent a collision between the tools and values of the early internet — self-hosting open source software using well-defined standards and interoperable protocols — and the reality of the modern internet — a few centralized, trusted authorities.

the way we think about a decentralized city is that it's not all in one place um and so if you know you think about cities being built around the dominant technology of the 00:10:37 era uh for the past century that was cars we want to build cities around the dominant technology of this century which is the internet and blockchains and we think how that works is that people will be connected through this 00:10:51 mesh network online and through the dow but then they will actually live in you know physical locations that are spread out all over the world you can think of each of those as like a neighborhood in the city

how do you how do you think about what that community looks like and how you communicate that because in many senses you could say obviously you're hoping to build utopia 00:09:30 not dystopia right but but utopia and dystopia are different things with different people right and you could start out on this journey with uh with everyone saying we're going 00:09:42 to go to here point point a and then actually they decide their life changes they have a family or whatever they want to go over here and they put a lot of time into this or and equally point a could actually end up not looking like what they want to to be 00:09:55 part of how are you managing that journey for the people as part of the path

Similarly, you must give up the assumption that there are privileged places, notes of special and knowledge-ensuring quality. Each note is just an element that gets its value from being a part of a network of references and cross-references in the system. A note that is not connected to this network will get lost in the Zettelkasten, and will be forgotten by the Zettelkasten.

The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between "Bellheads" (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and "Netheads" (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"): https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

v5: added git and github (thanks @ceejbot), and RSS (thanks @zem42). Taking suggestions for hierarchical/distributed and hierarchical/decentralized.

they allow resources to be referred to without the need for a continuously available host, and can be generated by anyone who already has the file, without the need for a central authority to issue them. This makes them popular for use as "guaranteed" search terms within the file sharing community where anyone can distribute a magnet link to ensure that the resource retrieved by that link is the one intended, regardless of how it is retrieved.

over the past decade and change a dynamic ecosystem has developed around cryptocurrencies and blockchains. And it’s constantly getting more complicated. We’ve now got non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, unique digital bits purchased with crypto that have mostly been associated with weird pieces of digital art and are an arena that looks very much like a bubble. There are stablecoins, cryptocurrencies that are supposed to be less volatile, pegged to something like the US dollar. There’s also the burgeoning world of decentralized finance, or DeFi, which tries to replicate a lot of the financial system but without intermediaries, and there are decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, essentially internet collectives. Now, much of this is falling under the still-nascent umbrella of Web3, a relatively fuzzy reimagining of the internet on blockchains.

the decentralised and open source nature of these systems, where anyone can host an instance, may protect their communities from the kinds of losses experienced by users of the many commercial platforms that have gone out of business over the last decades (e.g. Geocities, Wikispaces or Google + to name just a few).

The artwork I bought was a Channel S0 Founder NFT. Channel is a decentralised media organisation aiming to build new tools for creators in the web3 era

The second reason might support positive change. The existence of tokens and decentralization means that it’s possible to build resilient open source communities where early contributors and supporters benefit handsomely over time. No one owns these communities, and we can hope that these communities will work hard to serve themselves and their users, not the capital markets or other short-term players.

When the originators of DAOstack set about to architect solutions for decentralized governance, they recognized that given the complexity of the problem, the best solutions would emerge only over time, especially since needs would vary across use cases.So, first and foremost, they designed DAOstack to be not a fixed offering in decentralized governance, but rather a sandbox for ongoing experimentation, in which bits and pieces of governance infrastructure can be easily mixed and matched for each organization, like LEGO building blocks or WordPress templates.

Perhaps the biggest one is inefficiency. If you give everyone a voice, things can get very noisy very quickly, like an annoying neighborhood association meeting, multiplied by a thousand. The more you distribute decision-making power throughout an organization, the more you risk either taxing everyone’s attention with a sea of decision-making or creating gridlock among decision-makers — or both.So, if you’re going to coordinate a crowd effectively, you need technology not just for making proposals and tallying votes, but also for managing the collective attention. You need ways to determine who can make proposals and how. You need ways to determine which proposals should actually get the attention of the voters — sort of like means of voting on what to vote on. And you need ways to determine who should be involved in each decision, according to reputation or subject-matter credibility.

For this we created the $WRITE token, a crypto alternative to the traditional platform invitation system. Obtaining one $WRITE token affords someone publishing power on Mirror. In exchange for burning their token, users are granted a unique plot on the Mirror frontier, which includes a unique name on ENS (*.mirror.xyz) and a minted publication.

Conversely, a proactive training environment is more democratic. Learning is typically bottom-up, with employees playing an active role in identifying potential learning needs, setting their own learning paths, and even contributing to course materials.

So, what problem is blockchain solving for identity if PII is not being stored on the ledger? The short answer is that blockchain provides a transparent, immutable, reliable and auditable way to address the seamless and secure exchange of cryptographic keys. To better understand this position, let us explore some foundational concepts.

organizationally organizationally centralized decentralized logically eg *new* centralized Paypal Bitcoin logically eg eg decentralized Excel e-mail

A former FB executive and long-standing friend of Zuckerberg emailed him in 2012 (page 31) to say “The number one threat to Facebook is not another scaled social network, it is the fracturing of information / death by a thousand small vertical apps which are loosely integrated together.”

1. Embrace decentralized learningCentralized learning flows out from a single point: instructors teach and employees learn. But many businesses are shifting towards a more decentralized approach, making this system obsolete. More employees are working remotely and asynchronously, and they need to break learning into small chunks that fit into their daily work schedule. The first step in decentralizing learning is to shift to online classes that can be completed in micro-sessions throughout the week.

And it’s tempting for engineers to think decentralising the Web can be achieved with technology. But really, it’s people who will make it happen. Rather than staying put in our little filter bubbles, we can burst out of them — and be radically sociable, delinquent, and make a scene.

Or think of the iPhone owners who patronize independent service centers instead of using Apple's service: Apple's opening bid is "You only ever get your stuff fixed from us, at a price we set," and the owners of Apple devices say, "Hard pass." Now it's up to Apple to make a counteroffer. We'll know it's a fair one if iPhone owners decide to patronize Apple's service centers.

For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.

. DApps are powered by smart contract software that automated the logic of a business agreement. DApps help cut out the middlemen. Bankers, brokers, lawyers and escrow agents are no longer needed really to guarantee the execution of an agreement.

the idea of decentralized business models. These are business models distributed across a blockchain network not centralized in a traditional corporation. They can be fully autonomous too, meaning no humans involved. There's big potential for true peer-to-peer models like ride-sharing without Uber as a middleman taking fees. Owners of driverless cars will someday be able to put their autonomous vehicles to work. So even the big disruptors can be disrupted by this new technology.

This library is part of a general project at the Internet Archive (archive.org) to support the decentralized web.

these platforms aim to provide experiences “that people want to use that works as much as possible as they expect, but which is backed up by better values and technology.”

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.

I imagine that the first part of this project will focus on how it got to be this way, what got missed or ignored in some of the early warnings about what was happening online and how those warnings were swamped by the hype depicting the Internet as a space of radical democratization.

As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS. Everything old is new again. RSS was an essential part of Web 1.0 before surveillance capitalism (Web 2.0) took over.

does not host the user-generated comments centrally

the vision is for a decentralized and open annotation infrastructure

Huge web properties were started during this era including Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the process, the importance of centralized platforms like AOL greatly diminished.

I usually write in Google's online word processor Google Docs, even when noting the company's shortcomings. This article is different: it was drafted in a similar but more private service called Graphite Docs.

The aim has always been to help decentralise the internet and provide a platform that hands control back to users.

Over time, ICANN has begun to favor the interests of companies like Verisign, owners of .com, instead of users. Worse, they recently favored the sale of .org, a domain extension used by a huge number of important global non profits, to a private equity firm with many former ICANN employees.

GIS and Spatial Analytics Market: Global Size

I like the spirit of proof-of-stake because it tries to solve the problem, but I’m going to point out two things: Proof-of-stake is not yet proven, and, prior to proof-of-work, nobody was sure that decentralized consensus was possible. When proof-of-work gained acceptance, computer scientists were running naked in the streets with excitement. Therefore I default to extreme skepticism - but I’ll keep my eye out for any nerdy-looking streakers. Anybody who’s been involved in crypto-currencies for more than a year who smoothly transitions from “PoW is a great revolution” to “obviously PoW was never the long term solution” deserves a hard poke in the eye for the duration of my choosing.

Only people with nothing to fear see the idea of a completely connected world as unequivocally good

The future we're fighting for has no analog in mainstream tech, and so it's hard to articulate our strategy using their words. I know that we can feel it, though-- when a new person suddenly gets what we are attempting to do, it is like two instruments slowly coming into tune.

The philosophy of the modern web has saturated our world so thoroughly that corporate goals have the appearance of common sense

The hurdle we face today is not lack of skill, it's depression

stop waiting for these companies to get better

Avant-Pop artists welcome the new Electronic Age with open arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances of finding an audience of like-minded individuals who we can communicate and collaborate with

Soon the Data Superhighway will finally once and for all do away with the high-priced middlemen, and artists will reap the benefits of their own hard-earned labor. The distribution formula will radically change from Author - Agent - Publisher - Printer - Distributor - Retailer - Consumer to a more simplified and direct Author (Sender) - Interactive Participant (Receiver)

The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked Avant-Pop experience. One way to achieve this would be by creating and expanding niche communities. Niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene, will become, by virtue of the convergent electronic environments, virtual communities. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively-generated electronic publications, individually- designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi- media interactive hypertexts, conferences, etc., Avant-Pop artists and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist- author creates their beautifully-crafted, original works of art to be consumed primarily by the elitist art-world and their business- cronies who pass judgement on what is appropriate and what is not.

something else is starting to take hold in the cultural imagination

My dream is to have people inspired to make webpages again about whatever they'd like, and share them in ways that don't promote competitive, addictive 'engagement stats'. And to have cyber-regional zine libraries that are collecting and supporting different scenes' work

to visit a dat site, much like reading a zine, requires that you ask for it from the creator of it (or be a part of a culture that is supporting and sharing them)

There is no implicit way to discover dat sites--instead you have to share your link with friends and hope they support, seed, and share the link too. A dat site spreads, then, through classic, social and 'underground' channels

Work with what you have, to support the people around you and together you'll create a community that has a defined shape and form only in hindsight. Instead of worrying about having enough onboarding ramps, I say we make a future space that is so exciting, so fun, that is such a cool party with lights so bright that everyone wants to build their own methods to get here and join in. And I thought: what's the coolest, most party thing in the world? Reading.

The future I want is decentralized, consensual, anarchist, feminist, and cool

Freedom to organizeAragon lets you freely organize and collaborate without borders or intermediaries. Create global, bureaucracy-free organizations, companies, and communities.

The world’s first digital jurisdictionAragon organizations are not only great because they are decentralized, global and unstoppable. They will also benefit from the Aragon Network, the world’s first digital jurisdiction.

We need to learn to see the cumulative impact of a multitude of efforts, while simultaneously keeping all those efforts visible on their own. There exist so many initiatives I think that are great examples of how distributed digitalisation leads to transformation, but they are largely invisible outside their own context, and also not widely networked and connected enough to reach their own full potential. They are valuable on their own, but would be even more valuable to themselves and others when federated, but the federation part is mostly missing. We need to find a better way to see the big picture, while also seeing all pixels it consists of. A macroscope, a distributed digital transformation macroscope.

This summer, Web activists plan to convene at the second Decentralized Web Summit, in San Francisco.

For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding.

STRENGTH THROUGH DECENTRALIZATION

To put it plainly, no reputation system is resistant to a Vendor purchasing their own items and making false-positive ratings.This is especially true of a pseudonymous decentralized marketplace, where Buyer identities are — by default — undisclosed. Even a web-of-trust model, which is excellent at detecting suspicious islands of ‘reputable’ users, will not be able to distinguish between real and fake ratings of a Vendor.