You raise some good points regarding benefits of integration in AP. I mentioned some classic technologies that could be packaged well together to form something cohesive, you claim this is it. Ok, i concede - i think i would be interested in a “platformless”, websitelike protocol but that doesn’t preclude something like an interoperable forumlike protocol from being useful.

That being said,
> I don't know what kad is, but most of the things you list on your spectrum of decentralization had dominant players, whether it's DNS, gpg keys, CAs, or torrent trackers. I'm not going to split hairs on whether the dominance of keybase meant gpg is not really decentralized.

Most of what i mentioned is indeed semi centralized - but also semi decentralized. it and that was the point - there is no one true way to “decentralize” - is the star trek federation decentralized? is banks’ culture?

You make some very general claims regarding what decentralized systems don’t solve, but whatever your argument, you base it off some specific model of what is decentralized (you define a binary criterion). Whatever you claim, you can claim only for that model and indeed! that model doesn’t attempt to solve many problems that found in previous decentralized models and that are desirable to solve, and hence my criticism.

We’ve designed a slightly more advanced wordpress. Let’s celebrate! I would hope for something more imaginative. And indeed some are trying.

And, people are free to work on what they like of course - who am i to judge? Well, unfortunately i find myself to not be in the position and with a strong enough passion about this to do something myself, but im affected just as everyone alive is.

I do see seemingly better attempts as we’ve discussed, and in this particular case im worried that worse is the enemy of better, due to network effects. Any traction of a worse platform takes away from a better one.

Finally, gpg keys existed way before keybase and are actually one of the actually distributed and decentralized systems, so it’s curious that you picked specifically on this example.

gpg keys are entirely local first. Actually decentralized and usable to the individual user level. On top were built various webs of trust by mutual signing and publication of public keys to various public directories.

Keybase were able to package this neatly with added features and they enjoy some network effects but their data is public - you could spin up a compatitor before the end of the year ( it is dec 31 :) without losing any data. Or with a completely separate web of trust, that could also trust keybase keys.

ssh keys are similar in this regard, except the usage patterns are different and so keys are trusted on an individual basis or when signed by some organization/“community” wide ca. Im sure you know all this already.

Both of these last two examples demonstrate that in some cases decentralization does work, well. If we go with your “decentralized” model - “power to the states, not the people” - inevitably you get monopolistic players that kill off the standard as youve observed yourself. Like happened with email, with jabber, with rss, with browsers, like will happen with AP.

This is not a faster, quieter, cleaner or more efficient dishwasher. This is the exact same one we had last year, except with chrome finish, touch buttons and built in wifi. It will get picked up by the same sort of people that bought the old version - namely ones buying their first one or whose 10 machine broke.

It will fail and be unsatisfactory in fundamentally the same ways, since nothing changed in the mechanical specs. And in 10 years some extra features will be added like a voice assistant, to justify the raised priced on the same old crap.