From a efficiency perspective centralized anything seems better at first glance, however decentralized anything just seems more resilient in the long run like nature and/or our universe.
>and people will compromise speed for data sovereignty
People should always compromise speed for data sovereignty! Who said: that in this digital day and age, information about money is more important than money!
Non-deterministic, sure. But also they are powerful, at least powerful enough to launch a cyberattack. Until this morning, that was not a power that I thought they had outside of fiction.
And, the thing is, I don't want non-deterministic things to have that kind of power. We don't want that. We want that kind of power to not be triggered by a random number generator.
Since my last smart phone broke, I have held out on getting a smart phone for personal use. Sure for doing professional stuff for work, I'll use the work phone, but NOT going to pay my own money to get a surveillance device now.
If you are a business, and the you don't have a web site working, then yeah too bad.
Until Ubuntu Touch or something similar catches up and can run on old smart phone in a reliable way (not having to hunt down ROM like LineageOS ) it will be going back to before 2007 for me. It is more inconvenient sometimes, but life is also better in many ways.
Love FerretDB, but it doesn't really replace MongoDB's GridFS which is main reason why most people who are really using Mongo now day. Anyone knows a good replacement for GridFS?
Why would anyone use GridFS for any serious use case? It costs 10-20x as much as storing the files on S3. If unless you already have all your data in MongoDB and don't want an additional dependency for a small number of files it makes sense, but it definitely is not a case for using MongoDB by itself.
Seems like nothing can really get around this without a server/relay/TUN/STUN server. Peer to Peer messaging just doesn't work otherwise.
Saw Iroh post on HN. Just wonder how it differ from Nostr, Scuttlebutt or Yggdrasil or DHT etc? Many from Nostr claim that they are successor of scuttlebutt, but many devs from Scuttlebutt highly dispute that.
Be good to get a comparison between these protocols for devs who want to use them.
Stable IP addresses solve it as well, but these kinds of things are not generally aimed at contexts where those are an option. Even IPv6 isn't generally stable - the prefix is ISP-defined and tends to vary similarly to IPv4 with CGNAT.
There's also "dynamic DNS", which is basically just caching one side of that server/relay/TUN/STUN handshake, and relying on DNS for global discovery.
For Iroh vs Scuttlebutt / DHT, I'll break that into two parts:
1) Iroh uses DHT for host discovery: https://docs.iroh.computer/about/faq#how-is-iroh-different-f... , and Iroh is more about "use that DHT to get a usually-direct connection globally and then you can do whatever you want", while Scuttlebutt is strictly "... and use that connection to exchange append-only logs via gossip, to implement the Scuttlebutt protocol". (Iroh does have some first-party protocols you can use, but it's lower level in general)
2) Scuttlebutt isn't DHT-based, it's "connect to a known IP to get its data and discover connections" -> "connect to them and repeat..." -> "connect further..." -> etc, plus limited-hop feed replication by default. There isn't a global lookup to connect to any member or retrieve any data, it's all friend-of-a-friend connections and you can (and do) lose connection to someone if they get a new IP address and there's no F-o-a-F(-o-a-F(...)) replication route from them that reaches you (rare in practice since they likely re-connected to people they follow, which eventually trickles data through the mesh similarly to before). This is also part of the reason that it works instantly when you're on the same network as someone - it's less "it can work locally if you don't have internet access" and more "local is just a discovery method, the internet isn't special at all because it's all just direct connections".
And as far as I understand Nostr, it's conceptually similar to Scuttlebutt, but with direct support for centralizing for performance (relays) and some degree of mutability / forgetfulness / etc. Scuttlebutt is a bit extreme about its logs being immutable and the only way to exchange data, and it's part of the reason it can have rather major perf issues (like needing to pull gigabytes of data before you can discover a feed's display name). (I say this as a fan of Scuttlebutt in principle, but not in practice - there are lots of practical issues with existing implementations that could be solved, but haven't, and it's a large part of why the ecosystem split into other protocols)
It may also be worth pointing out that DHTs also need stable hosts to serve as initial bootstrappers, and apps that use them tend to hard-code a web URL where they can get a small list of those nodes. They just use them to discover other nodes, and save them for next time so the bootstrappers aren't constantly needed.
Iroh doesn't use DHT as its main discovery mechanism. It uses DNS/pkarr and relays as the primary method. DHT is a separate feature if folks like to do that, we don't have it on by default and don't have it on the public relays.
The whole idea is p2p but trying to be realistic about what network environments actually look like.
There has definitely been a lot of blind-idealism in a lot of P2P systems, yea. Though sometimes that's because it was/is just a PoC to see if it works at all, and then it grows too large to change / needs to be forked.
Iroh is definitely near the top of my "play with it some time" list, that pragmatism is very important for building normal things that normal people will be using :)
From a efficiency perspective centralized anything seems better at first glance, however decentralized anything just seems more resilient in the long run like nature and/or our universe.