Yesterday for quite some time an excellent article featured on Hacker News written by Cade Diehm. It didn’t get much attention, maybe due to its title, but it contained a very urgent message to anyone involved in evolving The Decentralized Web.
https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine/
Some quotes from the article:
The resilience of centralised networks and the political organisation of their owners remains significantly underestimated by protocol activists. At the same time, the decentralised networks and the communities they serve have never been more vulnerable. The peer-to-peer community is dangerously unprepared for a crisis-fuelled future that has very suddenly arrived at their door.
The article details about the demise of early P2P applications such as Napster which seemed at one time poised to win the Copyright War, and mentions BitTorrent that exposed its users to litigators.
Then it goes into the optimism we now feel for new decentralized protocols, and which attract a large user base of people with often outspoken, non-mainstream, rather activist opinions that embrace new platforms as safe havens to express themselves. But…
As we can see from history, blind faith in technically resilient network protocols is naïve and misplaced.
And further on the article goes specifically into detail on popular decentralized protocols, such as DAT, SSB, and ActivityPub.
So what is needed?
[The current] global instability demands platform reform. Peer-to-peer networks theoretically offer a level of resilience, safety and community determination that may no longer be possible with these incumbent powers. The moment demands not another protocol, not another manifesto, not another social network, but a savvy understanding of the political dynamics of protocols and the nakedness of today’s networks. By embracing a reverse Shock Doctrine as a Service , developing clear, historically-grounded narratives, and building sensitivity to the user’s abilities and safety, these new decentralisation reformists can succeed where others have failed.
How?
There is a rich but incomplete field of emergent work to draw from: New frameworks such as Socio-technical Security , and Decentralization off the shelf , exist to assist protocol designers understand and model interfaces and threats more completely and realistically. We must draw from groups that resist the Californian Ideology’s definition of identity, from the 1970s civil-rights aligned student activists who fought against digitised student records, to today’s Decolonise Design movement. Reformists must cede space for decision-making and expertise to under-represented or assailed communities.
The article concludes (emphasis mine):
We can no longer marvel at the novel interactions afforded by peer-to-peer technologies, nor perform political theatrics within these networks. We need to lay aside our delusions that decentralisation grants us immunity – any ground ceded to the commons will be met with amplified resistance from those who already own these spaces. […]
Without cohesive organisation, mobilisation to harden security and privacy and without a sincere commitment from protocol designers to revise their collective assumptions, the push back from incumbent power will leverage each and every socio-technical flaw in each and every network.