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geokon | on: TikTok goes dark in the US
I mean there is still the FSF and there are plenty of interesting projects working in the decentralizing space.

My point it's just really moved to the periphery and is a subculture (and tied to crypto, which has a lot of shady things associated with it). The mainstream tech culture seems extremely nationalistic and terrified of the possibilities of a supranational unregulated unmoderated internet

openrisk | parent | next
It was inevitable. Human affairs outside brief chaotic periods are typically regulated in terms of 'legitimate' authorities. The presice constitution of such authority has changed over the aeons (bloodlines, theology etc) but in the modern world has settled on the nation-state. Everything, from the exercise of power, to the financial system and granting licenses to operate is granted by the state.

In retrospect what is surprising is how long it took for such a disruptive new technology to register with existing power structures (at least explicitly).

dfex | parent
Decentralisation projects are trying to solve the problem of massive scale without central control.

Why are we trying to build a single unified platform for everything?

Maybe the friction of having different networks/applications based on the specific subculture/group you wish to associate with keeps them all a little less mainstream? Maybe this is a good thing?

geokon | root | parent
Yeah, keeping it within a subculture has its benefits. I don't mean to be overly judgmental or saying how things should be.

I just wouldn't have guessed thing would have gone this way. I'd argue that the early Google was a bit of this nerd ethos going mainstream. And the degeneration was not top down from MBAs as one would predict, but seemingly from the bottom up from a new generation of programmers that don't seem to be in that supranational mindset

Being non mainstream also does present some issues. For instance I'm in China traveling at the moment. Github isn't blocked here but the connection is very flakey and some days it doesn't load at all. But effectively all OSS dev happens on github so I'm just out of luck. It'd be cool if there was some way to torrent repos for instance, but I don't think that's a service hooked up to github in any way

There's a middle ground where you get the worst of all worlds bc the current kinds lame/oring solution works for 90% of people most of the time

Anyway, it is what it is. You don't choose the jungle you live in