There’s a discussion going on the Topology discord about what systems can be described as peer-to-peer.
I think the whole thing is mostly academic, and too focused on implementation details.
Sure, your particular choice of blockchain might have a peer-to-peer gossip protocol and consensus mechanism, but that’s rather irrelevant if people are mostly using tokens with a freeze authority, isn’t it?
And while Binance Smart Chain might have a P2P protocol for sharing information, that’s entirely irrelevant when it’s completely proof-of-authority and a single institution chooses who gets to validate.
If you are looking to describe a system, describe the kind of things it enables that no other approach does.
That’s something the local-first camp does right, and something other projects should strive for.
BlueSky is launching a federation developer sandbox. What does that mean?
Backlash Technology is a term coined by Peter Watts - it’s tech for which one of the key properties is a prominently displayed middle finger at something else. Think Signal and Telegram adoption spikes whenever WhatsApp screws something up, or crypto as a reaction to the financial system (particularly in places plagued with hyperinflation).
I got reminded of the term by a discussion regarding Bluesky vis-a-vis Mastodon, the Fediverse, and ActivityPub. It seems that something being Backlash Tech can also provide a certain stickiness, since it a lot of the reactions could be summed up as “I’ve already lashed back, what else does this add?”
Here’s the link, if you are curious. The conversation is biased towards skepticism - expected, given the participants and where it’s taking place - but there are some good points in there.
Last week I had the privilege to speak at infiniTIFF Summit, a part of the Transylvanian Film Festival dealing with technology, storytelling and experimental narratives.
I wrote Stories We Tell Ourselves for the summit. Below is a slightly longer version of the talk I gave.