GRIN Community is Obsessed with Centralization

Rants & Flames
1

For a community that claims to love decentralization you all constantly talk in:

Telegram: banned from several countries, less secure than decentralized alternatives, NOT e2e encrypted in group chats and is where most of this community is on (pretty pathetic)

Discord: HORRIBLE centralized service with 0 focus on privacy – it is SPYWARE, absolutely not e2ee and easy to hack and save logs locally. GRIN is the future of digital cash, it inherently poses a threat to governments and Discord bans communities it arbitrarily believes are extremist. How long until the GRIN community is seen as the same? Discord is already monitored by third parties, the GRIN “server” being no exception.

Keybase: Owned by Zoom, one of the worst organizations there is when it comes to privacy.. Hasn’t received many updates in a long time, has already banned communities it deems extreme.

There are decentralized alternatives that none of you seem to be interested in despite multiple voices from the community explaining what they are.

The GRIN community should be on decentralized services, period – the first step is making platforms on the Fediverse:

What’s the Fediverse?

The Fediverse (a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”) is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. On different servers (instances), users can create so-called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols which follow an open standard. As an identity on the fediverse, users are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities. In some cases, users can even show or share data (video, audio, text, and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities and allow other identities to edit other users’ data (such as a calendar or an address book).

A great video to watch to get a basic idea of the Fediverse is Fixing Social Media for Good posted by Luke Smith on Jan 13/2021

GRIN could be on: Pleroma, Matrix, Peertube, Friendica or more if it wanted.

As sugu has said:

Telegram for the community involvement is a major disappointment. I can’t even use it because of the phone number requirement… [Telegram] is a walled garden with quasi KYC that will lock in the content. They will have ultimately the last say who can and who cannot be Grin community. I think this is an insensible decision that is not in line with Grin’s spirit. Sorry to be blunt, but this is how I feel and I think it is obvious.

So GRIN Community, can we switch to decentralized services and create social platforms to be a part of that aren’t using centralized services and use e2ee for chatting?

Let me guess, you’ll discuss it on Telegram :roll_eyes:

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Why use Grin if you can just use Paypal?
Transactions are cheap and fast.
No complicated software installs, and the UI is nice and easy.
They can reset your password or revert transactions if needed.

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Keybase was not owned by Zoom when the community started there. The problem we have today is that we have too few active community members on existing communication channels. Even though I’d love to see us use matrix or something similar, I think picking an even more obscure platform only magnifies the problem and reduces the community size even further. Perhaps building a bridge between the communities would be a better first step. We already had some working on the bridges e.g. discord has keybase/telegram bridge. Yes, we could build a bridge with a better platform, but it has not been done yet. My guess is there are very few people in the community today that would install new chat software only to have a grin communication channel which is why I think a sudden transition may do more damage than good. I could be wrong though.

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The solution is simple: Close the keybase, close the discord, close the telegram and switch to Matrix.

Give users a link to the new platform and show them ways to join that doesn’t use the community’s central grin servers as matrix users can register from any homeserver.

Being on the aforementioned centralized platforms already damages the community and the image of GRIN.

PS: You’ll also clear out the hundreds of inactive users from those platforms as well.

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5

That would make us centralized dictators!
I would love to see the community move to more decentralized channels, but that should be a choice of to the individual.
The best thing here would be to just ‘start’ post about it and see if people are willing to join in.
Best keep it limited though since indeed we are already spread thinly as a community over all the (centralised-) services.

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No, it would put GRIN community on the decentralized web and remove the centralized platforms that the community are on currently. T̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶t̶f̶o̶r̶m̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶a̶d̶m̶i̶n̶i̶s̶t̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶w̶a̶y̶ – put them in charge of a matrix server, that’s fine!

Nothing will change until a big change is made – a hardfork of the way GRIN community communicates.

GRIN is used to hardforks you know.

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I think that a phase of low community engagement is the best time for a migration. Much easier than with a large community, since only the Grin diehards are left that would follow anywhere.

While most Big Tech platforms try to force you to install their app and provide personal information, most of the fediverse apps are available as webapps and support mutliple other open source clients. Create account and you’re in. Much lower friction in that regard. While there is more friction usually with the UX, because they are built on much less money, but honestly, most of them are pretty good.

I’d agree for the community communities, but I disagree when it comes to the “official” communities, like the dev channel or governance. These should be as open as possible.

Keybase makes it hard to create a backup. We are at risk to lose the early history. I think this would be easier with a more open platform.

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I’m not sure that’s correct. From my understanding the owners are discord (mcmike), telegram(burkett, mac) and keybase (quentin, antiochp,…).

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Correct, they all have different owners. I’m not aware of even a single overlap in moderators of any of those 3 platforms. The only overlap is the forum and keybase, which are largely owned and moderated by the same people. Everything else is owned by a different group of people, with a different focus. Our communication channels are probably the most decentralized thing about Grin.

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Besides of Paypal, there are also Stripe, Visa and Mastercard, all of them lead by distinct CEOs. The payment landscape is practically decentralized enough. Don’t mind the data grabs, they are all doing it. :upside_down_face:

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11

See

for a good analogy of your point (or lack thereof, respectfully – actually, please go back and read my opening post, it’s clear you haven’t).

My point stands and I urge the community to abandon those centralized platforms for a decentralized one. I’ll be pushing this whenever I can until it happens, I’m here to stay and have been here for a long time.

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Grin community is more decentralized than Grin. you worry for wrong reasons my friend.

Worry for Grin. Not communication channels.

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Create Grin community group in matrix if you wish, people will join. There’s no need to close telegram or discord, and I doubt it’s possible.

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Here’s a further solution, multiple matrix servers. Close the telegram, put a Matrix server in its place with the same moderation team as your telegram server, Close the Discord, make a matrix server in its place with the same mod team, close keybase, create a matrix server in its place and give the same mods the privileges.

You guys who are using Telegram, Discord and Keybase aren’t doing the right thing, there’s no decentralization there.

You are wrong… Read my OP.

I’m not worried about GRIN. Users are the problem.

No they won’t. The community is spread thin as it is. Hardfork the community communication channels into actually decentralized + FOSS servers otherwise there’s nothing decentralized about the GRIN community.

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Prefacing a statement with “respectfully” does not offset being disrespectful :wink:

I read your post. You’re suggesting a decentralized platform. I’m arguing that the benefits of that are less than the decentralization we get from having multiple active platforms managed by different communities.

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You are choosing to ignore the major problems with using centralized services. I implore you to read my OP again, maybe click a link or two.

And my suggestion here:

addresses the concerns of having “multiple active platforms”.

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If you want this to happen, set up the servers and start attracting users. Stop demanding others to implement your ideas. People who do that just waste time for those who actually contribute to this ecosystem.

Respectfully.

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No, this requires senior GRIN members to participate actively and understand the true meaning of decentralization, not a skewed version of it that doesn’t make sense any way you put it.

I’ll make a video on how to create matrix servers yourself if you want. Since you run the Telegram why don’t you set it up yourself and attract users by shutting down the Telegram and inviting people to use your matrix server instead?

I am open to holding your hand if need be… respectfully

Feel free to join my matrix server at https://grincoin.chat by the way

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Because this will just result in a smaller, less active community. I think Telegram is a fine choice, since it has a large userbase. The most decentralized platform in the world is pointless if it isolates 90% of our users.

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And this is why I made the topic title what I did – and the obsession with centralization attracts the wrong users.

Attracting the wrong users to GRIN (edit: community) is the wrong thing to do.