July 25th, 2024

Ask HN: Will peer to peer services overtake centralised corporations?

The discussion emphasizes the dominance of centralized internet services, questioning the future emergence of peer-to-peer alternatives and expressing a desire for more decentralized, individual-driven online services.

The discussion highlights the dominance of centralized services on the internet, which have become profitable but have also led to a loss of user control. The author questions whether strong peer-to-peer alternatives to these centralized systems will emerge in the future. They ponder if there will come a time when users prefer services offered by individuals rather than large corporations. While markets and exchanges for goods have long existed, the author notes that online services are still largely provided by big companies, with only limited examples of individual service provision, such as through app stores. The overall sentiment reflects a desire for a shift towards more decentralized and individual-driven online services.

15 comments

By @tetris11 - 4 months

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.

By @cl42 - 4 months

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.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire...

By @CM30 - 4 months

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.

By @aristofun - 4 months

No.

Crowd is always dumber and more inert than a small team of highly motivated and filtered (by market, luck etc) individuals.

By @austin-cheney - 4 months

Not likely. Most people are too lazy to do anything on their own and would happily pay money for subscriptions from centralized providers even when multiple, fantastic, easy, self hosted solutions are available.

By @a_tartaruga - 4 months

Both internet and web are themselves examples of what you are talking about. Maybe you're too young to have lived through it but for entertainment everyone used to watch TV decided by a few corporations.

You'll hear little positive about them on hacker news but there are many projects attempting to turn centralized services into market based p2p open services. Not clear if any will seriously work out, bitcoin is probably the only thing that is really working. But not clear others won't work out.

The many examples of functionalities fulfilled by decentralized structures in nature indicate that this is more complicated. The endocrine system and immune system in your body are beyond current human technology capability and are decentralized. But they also exist alongside a centralized nervous system.

By @mmphosis - 4 months

There's nothing you can do about it.

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.

By @Arch485 - 4 months

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.

By @maayank - 4 months

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.

By @solardev - 4 months

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.

By @dzonga - 4 months

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.

By @navjack27 - 4 months

Absolutely not. Never never never. Remember when little social media website ended up in the hands of a person a whole bunch of people don't like and some people left and other people stayed and just complained over and over just like they've been complaining over and over for a long time before that Even though alternatives existed and were going to exist in better forms over time and those people still stay on that platform and still complain even though they are being boiled frogs?

Take that situation and apply that to literally everything. People would rather be boiled alive and while they are being boiled alive they will proudly complain and yell... But they won't leave they won't jump ship even if something 1000% better exists and the friction to moving to that thing is nil.

People will act as though that thing that they are using and attach to and maybe even in some cases paying for is a public service or somehow inherent to their lives as a right or a lifeline when in all reality it isn't.

Centralized or decentralized has no bearing on this.

By @paxys - 4 months

Ask HN: Will peer to peer services overtake centralised corporations?

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