[Freedombox-discuss] "What's a Distributed Social Network?" -- the comic

[Thomas Lord]

Re: 
 
> Yes, "decentralized" does get the point across 
> much better, doesn't it?
> 




A minor issue - and I really hope I don't 
start a language fight but: on the meanings of 
"distributed" and "decentralized" ...


I like to encourage the usage described below.   
If I do accidentally start a language fight
let me announce in advance that I immediately
surrender and quit that fight :-)   You are
right, everyone who disagrees.    Here we go:


"distributed" means that a computation is
spread across multiple hosts.   "distributed"
is a strictly technical property of a 
software system.   I'm a little fuzzy on exactly
what we mean by "host" but, you get the idea.


"decentralized" means that there is no central
control (legal, social, economic, technical) of
a computing system.  

For example:   Amazon's cloud services and Google's
various services are "distributed" but they are 
"centralized".

Another example:  The MIT AI lab used to host 
an old ITS (Incompatible Time Sharing operating 
system) machine to which anyone who who heard
of it could obtain an account and easily obtain
the equivalent of "root".   That system was not
distributed - for it ran on a single machine - 
but it was, for the most part, decentralized.  (MIT
retained central control over when exactly to pull
the plug, of course.)

It's maybe too wordy but it is more accurate if we
talk about:

    distributed, decentralized social networking

to convey that no one host holds the whole thing (distributed)
and that no one party is in control (decentralized).

Of course, distributed and decentralized alone are
not all that we really mean.   After all, the cell phone
and land line telephony networks are, so to speak, both
distributed and decentralized but they are also in some
sense untrustworthy.  While decentralized, nevertheless
power over them is concentrated.  Though distributed,
not just anyone can add a new node.

We could try adding more adjectives:

    distributed, decentralized, personally emopwering 
    social networking

Ick.

Or maybe just stick with "distributed, decentralized" and
combine that with Eben Moglen's formulation:

    We replace that social networking functionality 
    but *you* control the server logs (that pertain to
    you).

("What's a server log?" -- asks dad :-)

-t

 


On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 14:36 -0800, J David Eisenberg wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Jake Emerson
> <jakeemerson at spatial.maine.edu> wrote:
> > Hi David,
> > The comic at http://dsn-test.com/comic is great. Just curious, though, why
> > did you choose the term "distributed" instead of "decentralized?"
> 
> Because I started writing the script shortly after Diaspora issued its
> first release, and their blog says: "Diaspora aims to be a distributed
> network..." That was the term that I saw more often in news articles,
> and it seemed to be in more common usage.
> 
> BTW, I just did a Google search for "distributed social networks"
> (about 41,800,000 results) vs. "decentralized social networks" (about
> 445,000 results).
> 
> Yes, "decentralized" does get the point across much better, doesn't it?
> 
> > Cheers,
> > Jake
> >
> [snip]
> 
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