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@ 5ea46480:450da5bd
2025-05-24 09:57:37Decentralization refers to control/power, and relates to censorship resistance. That is it, it is not more complicated then that. Resilience is a function of redundancy; a centralized censored system can have a redundant set-up and therefor be resilient.
Take Bitcoin; the blockchain is a central database, it is resilient because it has many redundant copies among a lot of different nodes. The message (txs and blocks) propagation is decentralized due to existence of a p2p network among these nodes, making the data distribution censorship resistant (hello op_return debate). But onchain transactions themselves are NOT p2p, they require a middlemen (a miner) because it is a central database, as opposed to something like lightning which is p2p. Peer to Peer says something about relative architectural hierarchical position/relation. P2P provides censorship resistance because it entails equal power relations, provided becoming a peer is permissionless. What makes onchain transactions censorship resistant is that mining is permissionless, and involves this open power struggle/game where competition results in a power distribution among players, meaning (hopefully) decentralization. The fact users rely on these middlemen is mitigated by this decentralization on the one hand, and temper-proofing via cryptographic signatures on the other, resulting in what we call trustlessness (or trust minimization for the autists in the room); we only rely on a miner to perform a job (including your tx into a block), but we don’t trust the miner to perform the job correctly, this we can verify ourselves.
This leads us to Nostr, because that last part is exactly what Nostr does as well. It uses cryptography to get tamper-proof messaging, which then allows you to use middle-men in a trust minimized way. The result is decentralization because in general terms, any middle man is as good as any other (same as with miners), and becoming such a middleman is permissionless(somewhat, mostly); which in turn leads to censorship resistance. It also allows for resilience because you are free to make things as redundant as you'd like.
Ergo, the crux is putting the cryptography central, making it the starting point of the system; decentralization then becomes an option due to trust minimization. The difference between Bitcoin an Nostr, is that Bitcoin maintains a global state/central ledger and needs this PoW/Nakamoto consensus fanfare; Nostr rests itself with local perspectives on 'the network'.
The problem with the Fediverse, is that it does not provide trust minimization in relation to the middlemen. Sure, there are a lot different servers, but you rely on a particular one (and the idea you could switch never really seemed to have materialized in a meaningful way). It also fails in permisionlessness because you rely on the association between servers, i.e. federation, to have meaningful access to the rest of the network. In other words, it is more a requirement of association than freedom of association; you have the freedom to be excommunicated.
The problem with ATproto is that is basically does not solve this dynamic; it only complicates it by pulling apart the components; identity and data, distribution and perspective are now separated, and supposedly you don’t rely on any particular one of these sub-component providers in the stack; but you do rely on all these different sub-component providers in the stack to play nice with each other. And this ‘playing nice’ is just the same old ‘requirement of association’ and ‘freedom of excommunication’ that looms at the horizon.
Yes, splitting up the responsibilities of identity, hosting and indexing is what is required to safe us from the platform hellscape which at this stage takes care of all three. But as it turns out, it was not a matter cutting those up into various (on paper) interchangeable middlemen. All that is required is putting cryptographic keys in the hands of the user; the tamperproofing takes care of the rest, simply by trust minimizing the middlemen we use. All the sudden it does not matter which middlemen we use, and no one is required to play nice; we lost the requirement of association, and gained freedom of association, which was the purpose of censorship resistance and therefor decentralization, to begin with.
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@ 7f6db517:a4931eda
2025-05-25 14:01:43
People forget Bear Stearns failed March 2008 - months of denial followed before the public realized how bad the situation was under the surface.
Similar happening now but much larger scale. They did not fix fundamental issues after 2008 - everything is more fragile.
The Fed preemptively bailed out every bank with their BTFP program and First Republic Bank still failed. The second largest bank failure in history.
There will be more failures. There will be more bailouts. Depositors will be "protected" by socializing losses across everyone.
Our President and mainstream financial pundits are currently pretending the banking crisis is over while most banks remain insolvent. There are going to be many more bank failures as this ponzi system unravels.
Unlike 2008, we have the ability to opt out of these broken and corrupt institutions by using bitcoin. Bitcoin held in self custody is unique in its lack of counterparty risk - you do not have to trust a bank or other centralized entity to hold it for you. Bitcoin is also incredibly difficult to change by design since it is not controlled by an individual, company, or government - the supply of dollars will inevitably be inflated to bailout these failing banks but bitcoin supply will remain unchanged. I do not need to convince you that bitcoin provides value - these next few years will convince millions.
If you found this post helpful support my work with bitcoin.
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@ 57d1a264:69f1fee1
2025-05-25 06:26:42
I dare to claim that the big factor is the absence of an infinite feed design.
Modern social media landscape sucks for a myriad of reasons, but oh boy does the infinite feed take the crapcake. It's not just bad on it's own, it's emblematic of most, if not all other ways social media have deteriorated into an enshitification spiral. Let's see at just three things I hate about it the most.
1) It's addictive: In the race for your attention, every addictive design element helps. But infinite feed is addictive almost by default. Users are expected to pull the figurative lever until they hit a jackpot. Just one more reel, then I'll go to sleep.
2) Autonomy? What's that? You are not the one driving your experience. No. You are just a passenger passively absorbing what the feed feeds you.
3) Echo chambers. The algorithm might be more to blame here, but the infinite feed and it's super-limited exploration options sure don't help. Your feed only goes two ways - into the past and into the comfortable.
And I could go on, and on...
The point it, if the goal of every big tech company is to have us mindlessly and helplessly consume their products, without agency and opposition (and it is $$$), then the infinite feed gets them half-way there.
Let's get rid of it. For the sake of humanity.
Aphantasia [^1]
Version: 1.0.2 AlphaWhat is Aphantasia?
I like to call it a social network for graph enthusiasts. It's a place where your thoughts live in time and space, interconnected with others and explorable in a graph view.
The code is open-source and you can take a look at it on GitHub. There you can find more information about contributions, API usage and other details related to the software.
There is also an accompanying youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeLOt-45rJM
[^1]: Aphantasia the software is named after aphantasia the condition - see Wikipedia for more information.
https://stacker.news/items/988754