Egregoros

Ethereum is spiritually and functionally controlled by one man, Vitalik, but it is still far more decentralized in practice than here, which has a dozen chokepoints

@sun i don't follow it much or closely, but from bits i see, i also have the impression he really does believe in decentralisation. not sure if that's an accurate impression i have?

@ilja He does. The "issue" is that he is a single person that can say something and Ethereum will probably change to accommodate that. It's a form of centralization but realistically you replace that with a committee and the chokepoint just shifts somewhere else

@sun yeah, that's a bit the duality i also see. and i think you gave fedi as a nice example. not one person who has a say, but in practice this also means more decisions where decentralisation isn't taken into account, leading to less decentralisation in practice.

@ilja in theory the Fediverse is an agreement on a protocol, in practice you follow exactly one guy's implementation that doesn't even follow the spec or your shit doesn't work

@sun @ilja due to the fundamental nature of software development every structure of it inevitably leads to dictatorship

@yohan @ilja I agree and I actually think embracing that is better outcome

@sun @ilja can you elaborate? I dont know how that can be a good thing considering i would still like to believe in free software