Ask HN: Will peer to peer services overtake centralised corporations?
We've watched huge centralised services thrive on top of the internet and become profitable companies. With that we've benefited a lot but also lost a lot of control. I don't think I'm saying anything surprising or new. I guess what I'm wondering is. Will we ever see strong peer to peer alternatives to these systems in the long run? At some point will we get to a place where we're actually happy to use a service provided by one person rather than a large entity? Markets and exchanges have existed for goods. Individuals provide services offline. But it seems online we really don't do this as much. Maybe the app store is some of that but still it skews heavily to big companies.
I think it has to. If SciHub and Anna's Archive have taught us anything it's that it just takes one person to offer an invaluable service to millions.
We're living in an age of unprecedented control by corporate powers, but we're also living in an age where it's very difficult to stop a signal from leaking from somewhere.
Corporations are currently building walled gardens and closing the doors behind them fast, but the scent of roses always wafts through the gates, and it really doesn't take much for a crafty fox to dig a tunnel.
So, you've sort of nailed it. You need someone who is willing to coordinate, but you can rely on protocols and technologies that allow for frictionless dissemination of information to do the heavy lifting. In the event of socials, PeerTube and Mastodon come to mind. Archiving is harder, you need someone to babysit spinning drives and physical media somewhere safe, hence why the Internet Archive requires more centralization and coordination (and a bit of deep pockets to fund someplace safe to store the bits and atoms). In your example, Bittorrent and torrents for the datasets being shared. If "information wants to be free," it can be done, but someone still has to herd cats (whether that be people and/or code) to bring about the desired outcome.
The piece to solve for is where the operations meets the legal entity, to ensure continuity and durability of the value provided. Again, look to the Internet Archive, Let's Encrypt, and Wikimedia to see how this is done. Certainly, it gets more challenging for an org like Anna's Archive that is in direct conflict with copyright law, but you can build and run high value, widely distributed systems without turning into Pied Piper.
Corporations are always going to chase fiat, it is inevitable, avoid relying on them whenever possible if you don't want to be disappointed when they try to corner the market and extract whatever they can from what potentially has become highly valuable at scale to the user population. Twitter and Reddit are the most glaring examples, but there are many others.
From a historical (and academic) perspective, most decentralized services seem to tend towards monopolization.
Telephones, radio broadcasting, and the Internet are all examples of once-decentralized, democratizing forces that were eventually centralized from a corporate control perspective.
I don't know if this will change in the future; it'd require either a very active legal agenda or incredibly engaged citizens/consumers.
"The Master Switch"[1] is a great book on the above.
My experience is that it seems like a cycle. People get frustrated with centralised systems and move towards more decentralised ones, and then centralised ones get better at UI/UX design and take traffic from the decentralised ones later. I mean, we saw lots of walled garden services lose to the internet as a whole, only to see internet forums and chat rooms lose out to services like Reddit and Discord.
I wouldn't be surprised if people were getting more and more fed up with existing social media sites and online services, and looking into alternative technologies at this point.
I can't predict the future. Asking good questions is a start. How about a free, absolutely no fees, peer to peer exchange for anyone. We already have strong peer to peer alternatives in the long run so far. Other than convenience, there's nothing stopping anyone from leaving the walled gardens, destroying all apps, and even scuttling today's web protocol for something much better. I think that there is an appetite and opportunity.
imo, in the current landscape we will not see any largely popular P2P services/platforms. Mastodon is largely a flop (it has a few deeply ingrained issues and a lot of usability problems), Web3 is a scam (nobody wants to pay money to visit websites), cryptocurrencies have too many usability & legislative problems to be widely useful, etc. etc.
One of the massive advantages that centralized platforms has is that they are almost always more convenient than a P2P alternative (think PayPal v.s. BTC, for example of a "send someone money" system), and newer P2P systems don't seem to be moving towards being more convenient. Until the convenience catches up, the masses will stick with centralized services.
I would consider (sadly) Matsodon as an anti-example. As much as we all know the issues with “the algorithm”, people find real value in automatic curation that I suspect is best served by a centralized authority.
Automatic curation doesn't have to be on the server side, much less by a centralized authority. An ML curation model won't even need the processing power used by client side LLMs these days.
All that said, my experience with mastodon is the opposite of what you described. I find the chronological feed to be always interesting and much less frustrating and emotionally draining than any curated feed that I know of. Members are a lot more considerate too. From the discussions there, I know that there are a lot of others who hold the same opinion.
crypto by it's very nature of being power hungry got centralized. and got taken away by scammers.
sadly the internet can't work like a real life bazaar. as in a bazaar the scammer would be held accountable and any destruction of trust by one individual would harm everyone.
if peer to peer services can keep everyone accountable then yeah they will take over centralized corporations.
No. There are economies of scale that synergize too well with capitalist monopolies. Even the internet itself, originally peer to peer, is largely taken over by a few gigacorps. There's a strong network effect to most of these things and users prefer one big place to go rather than a loose federation of a thousand small ones.
A big part of it was also surfing the web is more or less dead. Google created a search engine which killed browsing. Now Google search is dead and people have lost the ability to surf.
We're living in an age of unprecedented control by corporate powers, but we're also living in an age where it's very difficult to stop a signal from leaking from somewhere.
Corporations are currently building walled gardens and closing the doors behind them fast, but the scent of roses always wafts through the gates, and it really doesn't take much for a crafty fox to dig a tunnel.
The piece to solve for is where the operations meets the legal entity, to ensure continuity and durability of the value provided. Again, look to the Internet Archive, Let's Encrypt, and Wikimedia to see how this is done. Certainly, it gets more challenging for an org like Anna's Archive that is in direct conflict with copyright law, but you can build and run high value, widely distributed systems without turning into Pied Piper.
Corporations are always going to chase fiat, it is inevitable, avoid relying on them whenever possible if you don't want to be disappointed when they try to corner the market and extract whatever they can from what potentially has become highly valuable at scale to the user population. Twitter and Reddit are the most glaring examples, but there are many others.
Telephones, radio broadcasting, and the Internet are all examples of once-decentralized, democratizing forces that were eventually centralized from a corporate control perspective.
I don't know if this will change in the future; it'd require either a very active legal agenda or incredibly engaged citizens/consumers.
"The Master Switch"[1] is a great book on the above.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire...
I wouldn't be surprised if people were getting more and more fed up with existing social media sites and online services, and looking into alternative technologies at this point.
Crowd is always dumber and more inert than a small team of highly motivated and filtered (by market, luck etc) individuals.
I can't predict the future. Asking good questions is a start. How about a free, absolutely no fees, peer to peer exchange for anyone. We already have strong peer to peer alternatives in the long run so far. Other than convenience, there's nothing stopping anyone from leaving the walled gardens, destroying all apps, and even scuttling today's web protocol for something much better. I think that there is an appetite and opportunity.
One of the massive advantages that centralized platforms has is that they are almost always more convenient than a P2P alternative (think PayPal v.s. BTC, for example of a "send someone money" system), and newer P2P systems don't seem to be moving towards being more convenient. Until the convenience catches up, the masses will stick with centralized services.
All that said, my experience with mastodon is the opposite of what you described. I find the chronological feed to be always interesting and much less frustrating and emotionally draining than any curated feed that I know of. Members are a lot more considerate too. From the discussions there, I know that there are a lot of others who hold the same opinion.
sadly the internet can't work like a real life bazaar. as in a bazaar the scammer would be held accountable and any destruction of trust by one individual would harm everyone.
if peer to peer services can keep everyone accountable then yeah they will take over centralized corporations.