Lately, I see the trend of calling a lot of different things decentralized. In fact they all are, but at the same time they are very different.
The classical example of a decentralized application was the email server. Everyone could host one and they all would communicate with each other (in theory). And with the thing called Federation for Nextcloud, XMPP or Matrix servers it is pretty much the same. When you host a server, you have complete control over it.
But recently, we see all those blockchain enabled networks which store the data on some of its nodes. You have no idea where your data is stored (cloud like), just protected by by some encryption, which is considered safe as of today.
I am a huge fan of decentralized services as we have known them for a while, yet I look very skeptical at the new services. I mean they have their own set of unique features (e.g. excellent up-time, scaling on a network level, etc.), but at the same time they lack properties of the old decentralized applications (e.g. 'your data on your hardware').
Anybody knows if there are more precise terms than just calling them all 'decentralized'?
The classical example of a decentralized application was the email server. Everyone could host one and they all would communicate with each other (in theory). And with the thing called Federation for Nextcloud, XMPP or Matrix servers it is pretty much the same. When you host a server, you have complete control over it.
But recently, we see all those blockchain enabled networks which store the data on some of its nodes. You have no idea where your data is stored (cloud like), just protected by by some encryption, which is considered safe as of today.
I am a huge fan of decentralized services as we have known them for a while, yet I look very skeptical at the new services. I mean they have their own set of unique features (e.g. excellent up-time, scaling on a network level, etc.), but at the same time they lack properties of the old decentralized applications (e.g. 'your data on your hardware').
Anybody knows if there are more precise terms than just calling them all 'decentralized'?