Just now, I submitted a link for an upcoming decentralized chat protocol, <a href=“https://polyproto.org” rel=“ugc”>polyproto.org</a>. While trying to select a tag, it felt a bit difficult. In the end, I settled on <code>networking</code> and <code>web</code> but both feel slightly wrong because they don’t cover the topic that is the coolest about it, namely the decentralization aspect. In the past, there have been discussions about adding an <a href=“https://lobste.rs/s/4ixrx6/tag_proposal_atproto” rel=“ugc”><code>ATProto</code></a>, where <a href=“https://lobste.rs/~olegkovalov” rel=“ugc”>@olegkovalov</a> proposed a <code>decentralization</code> tag. Sure, it might be a bit too generic, but I personally think that decentralization would make up a good tag because many such technologies build upon similar technologies and concepts, trying to solve similar problems: Identity management, handling spam, handling sybil attacks, handling authentication, … I think a tag called <code>decentralization</code> would be nice and could be applicable to various technologies:

• BitTorrent and other P2P file sharing technologies

• Matrix and other decentralized chat protocols

• Potentially even E-Mail, though it already has its own tag, although not every post about E-Mail is related to its decentralized aspect and there are for sure interesting posts that cover just that, thereby allowing more fine-grained tagging

• Tor and other anonymity networks

• <a href=“https://forgejo.org/docs/v8.0/developer/federation-architecture/” rel=“ugc”>Upcoming Git forge federation</a>

• ATProto, ActivityPub, and other social networking technologies emphasizing decentralization

• Redundant data clusters(?)

• …

Happy to hear feedback about it. 🙂