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Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2017 22:53:55 UTC 
Danyl Strype
"In the 1980s people stopped sharing machines ...
http://qttr.at/20bz-
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2017 22:56:06 UTC
Danyl Strype
... probably for the same reason that people in decades prior stopped taking buses and streetcars and instead drove cars." - Paul Ford -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2017 22:57:17 UTC
Danyl Strype
Now we are going back to sharing machines that we are told exist in "the cloud". Could a return to mass transit be the future of transport? -
Antanicus (antanicus)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2017 22:59:22 UTC 
Antanicus
@strypey for the analogy to hold, all mass transit systems worldwide should be privatised first
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Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2017 23:11:11 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus privatization of public transport infrastructure has been underway for decades in this country, leading to
http://qttr.at/20c2 -
Antanicus (antanicus)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2017 23:18:58 UTC
Antanicus
@strypey and that's precisely why I used the word "worldwide". Let me explain: cloud computing has been pushed on us because it is profitable at a global scale (you can pay Amazon for an AWS instance regardless of your location); to achieve the same level of global profitability, mass transit systems should be privatised worldwide, by a small group of companies, given the hyper local nature of mass transit.
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Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2017 23:43:05 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus the point of the analogy is the shift from PC back to shared computing might actually be good, only the private ownership is bad -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 24-Nov-2017 23:43:55 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus if we replaced #Google and #FarceBook with entities run like #Wikipedia and #Archive.org would the 'centralization' be a problem? -
Antanicus (antanicus)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2017 00:47:24 UTC
Antanicus
@strypey I get it, and I agree with you. I just wanted to point out that global private ownership is a key difference between cloud infrastructures and mass transit ones. besides this, I am all for mass transit
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Antanicus (antanicus)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2017 00:50:04 UTC
Antanicus
@strypey centralized institutions will always suffer from "single failure point" problems, not to mention politics. I'd much prefer a decentralised replacement for both
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Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2017 01:30:42 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus but isn't this also an argument against mass transit and for personal vehicles? -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2017 01:50:11 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus taken to an extreme it even becomes an argument against public roads (private roading ownership being more 'decentalized') ... -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2017 01:52:20 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus ... or even an argument against roads as a single point of failure; and for flying cars (ie private jets) as more 'decentralized' -
Antanicus (antanicus)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2017 12:31:09 UTC
Antanicus
@strypey my bad, I should have expressed myself better. To me "decentralised" means every single community gets to both control and enjoy the local implementation of a given system, regardless of how other communities organise themselves. Private cars are not decentralised in this sense, as private ownership prevents the community at large from benefitting from them. Mass transit, on the contrary, grants access to all
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Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 15-Dec-2017 10:33:56 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus this is a fair definition of 'decentralized', but I can't see how the rest of your argument logically follows from it. -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 15-Dec-2017 10:35:32 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus communities don't get to control the local implementation of mass transit, it's determined by centralised transit authorities ... -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 15-Dec-2017 10:35:50 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus ... or in some cases private companies. -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 15-Dec-2017 10:38:47 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus each household's private vehicles implement the RDT (Road Transport Protocol) independent of other how others households do it... -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Friday, 15-Dec-2017 10:40:00 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus ... so it neatly fits your definition of 'decentralised', no? -
Antanicus (antanicus)'s status on Friday, 15-Dec-2017 10:44:46 UTC
Antanicus
@strypey hey :)
> so it neatly fits your definition of 'decentralised', no?
- not really, as private ownership is not benefiting the community as a whole, but only those who actually own the cars (though car polling and car sharing schemes sometimes alleviate this problem) -
Antanicus (antanicus)'s status on Friday, 15-Dec-2017 10:54:20 UTC
Antanicus
@strypey so we have two parallel situations:
- private cars are decentralized but do not benefit the community
- public transport is centralized but benefits the communityAn ideal scenario would be a decentralized transportation method that benefits the community, something we could achieve through cooperative ownership.
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Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 00:51:58 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus there's nothing in your definition of 'decentralized' about "benefiting the community". That's a totally separate issue -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 00:53:15 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus or maybe we could just accept the self-evident fact that centralized can sometimes be better than decentralized? -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 00:57:14 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus after all centralization vs. decentralization is only one criteria. There's also public vs. private, democratic vs. elite etc -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 01:02:44 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus coming back to the distribution of computing, which is where we started this discussion ... -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 01:04:06 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus what we're looking at is the distribution of two different things; processing and responsibility. The "cloud" centralizes both -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 01:05:35 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus "self-hosting" using leased access to datacentres decentralizes sysadmin responsibility while still centralizing processing -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 01:06:45 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus self-hosting using one's own hardware decentralizes both processing and sysadmin responsibilities, but with a loss of resilience -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 01:08:20 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus if your hardware fails (or your sysadmin skills) your services go down and/or data is lost. Datacentres provide many redundancies -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 01:09:52 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus so a publicly-owned, democratically-run datacentre might be a better model than full decentralization (self-hosting at home) -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 01:11:02 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus how many people, even among passionate software freedom geeks, self-host on their own hardware and pipe? Not many, if any -
Antanicus (antanicus)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2017 08:03:26 UTC
Antanicus
@strypey
A fair point, but only if you consider "traditional" approaches to self hosting. What happens if we add IPFS to the mix? Wouldn't that guarantee at least some form of redundancy and safety? -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2017 23:33:47 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus if it results in more of the data hosting and processing happening on premises, maybe. -
Danyl Strype (strypey)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2017 23:35:39 UTC
Danyl Strype
@antanicus but tools like #IPFS would be just as useful for distributing storage and processing between cooperatively-owned datacentres
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