Decentralisation as a shifting mental framework

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The “De” In “Decentralization” Stands For “Democracy”

There’s a certain dark irony in watching tech billionaires who built their empires on the “democratizing power of technology” now actively working to dismantle democratic institut…

Department of Decentralization | Department of Decentralization

The website for the Department of Decentralization

Practical Decentralization

The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.

Practical Decentralization

The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.

Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization by …

How Control Exists after Decentralization by Galloway, …

Decentralization: Worth The Wait — Open Tech Strategies | Blog

Ethan Zuckerman has a piece in Wired that says building decentralization tools is a sucker's bet. He and his coauthors, Chelsea Barabas and Neha Narula, mention the FreedomBox, which I helped lead, as an example of how difficult this stuff is. They point to a list of things that make decentralized efforts prone to failure and conclude:

a practical guide to decentralization (for my friends) - tim's tinkerings

Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.

Paradigm shifts for the decentralized Web

The answer to these questions varies with different degrees of decentralization:

Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.

On discourse and decentralisation

Over the last year, as Bluesky got more popular, conversations about whether Bluesky and ATProto are really ‘decentralised’ have gotten more “popular” as well. These conversations ranged from high-quality, productive back-and-forth articles to people just saying a lot of dumb stuff on the internet (shocker, I know). As time went on, this discourse has grown […]

Threat models

Or, what do we talk about when we talk about decentralization? People were up in arms recently in Bluesky about the reported censorship of an account, on request of The Turkish government.

Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

Despite being designed and operated as a decentralized network-of- networks, the Internet is continuously subjected to forces that encourage centralization. This document offers a definition of centralization, explains why it is undesirable, identifies different types of it, catalogues limitations of common approaches to decentralization, and explores what Internet standards efforts can do to address it.

The ecosystem is moving

Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies from the perspective of a product that many would like to see decentralize....