I increasingly feel like "decentralization" is the wrong goal to have, because it is just an unreliable proxy metric for the thing people *actually* care about, which is autonomy and self-determination
@riley The problem is that that isn't really what 'decentralized' means to people - it's not the opposite of 'centralized', but instead is used to describe a *spectrum* of both technical and social properties of a system, which often occur together, but not all of which are necessary (or even desirable!) in an autonomous system.
It also tends to draw the conversation to technical analysis exclusively, which isn't the important part of autonomy.
@riley The most obvious example: a P2P system without any kind of moderation or authority delegation mechanism, just direct peer-to-peer interactions, is certainly decentralized.
But it is not autonomous - it does not give people reasonable control over their experience, and the only plausible outcome is widespread abuse targeted at the most vulnerable, because it is a highly individualist design.
@joepie91 How do you really solve these problems in a centralized system though? Or I guess what I'm asking is, what's wrong with the way things are being tackled now? Technically right now even in the fediverse there are servers that are more popular than others with various levels of customizability and control. But if these were centralized servers in the sense of owned by a corpo sense then there'd be no other nice options.
@joepie91 and maybe even other problems like technically the auth server for this piece of open source software is also open source but no instance will talk to anything but the official auth server by default which is how many corporations have asserted their control.
@tachi See my response here: https://social.pixie.town/@joepie91/114069258495144349
@joepie91 It's a proxy if considered descriptively. But consider it normatively, and you'll get a basic precondition for autonomy: a system that is required to not assume existence of a single centre.