This is such a good tool to raise awareness about the state of decentralisation in this ecosystem! It's not just for dev teams and power users, but also for statistical evidence on the work that is being done re: regulatory discussions. It would be great to see Polkawatch's functionalities expanded onto Parachains, indeed.

However, I have noticed that your dapp is also using hosting services from Hetzner, meanwhile they have given a negative statement on the use of their platform for PoS-related applications here. Isn't Polkawatch worried that its dapp could also, one day, be affected by a ban from Hetzner? If so, isn't it worth investigating other (less ambivalent) providers from now on?

Thanks for your time. :)

@anaelleltd thanks for the support to expand to parachains.

Yes, you are absolutely right about Hetzner dependency in our deployment.

We are indeed planing to act on the Hetzner issue and move some infra.

There are some points that make our life easier:

• Significant part of the infra is hosted in our own datacenter.
• Most critical part of the customer facing part is hosted on IPFS, which is very easy to migrate. Thanks to our Distributed Data Pack architecture.
• Our operational model is based on 100% automated infra. Migrating should be easy.

The big question about Hetzner is whether others like OVH will follow suit. So I was thinking on looking for a more permanent solution, such as additional infra hosted somewhere out of EU-US.

I did not want to introduce infra changes so early (we only released last Quarter) but perhaps it would make sense to get IPFS up from a second network. That seems like a 20% effort for 80% of benefit.

Hey guys, sea212 from Zeitgeist here. Writing with my governance account.

Thanks for providing this proposal Valletech. We at Zeitgeist think it can be a powerful tool for Parachains to achieve true decentralization. It is evident by now that validators and collators usually select the economically most reasonable server providers and locations, which leads to an unreasonable clustering of block authoring nodes in certain regions and providers. This leads to more centralization. At Zeitgeist we use the parachain-staking pallet from PureStake to select Collators. The pallet incentivizes delegators (entities that put stake behind collators) to select reliable collators, since more produced blocks result in more staking rewards. It also incentivizes competition, because less backing results in higher returns and consequently delegators are encouraged to look out for new shining stars that don't have that much backing yet. However, some aspects that are important for a healthy network, such as decentralization, are not incentivized at all by the pallet (or the consensus system in general). For example, true decentralization through even dispersion of collators throughout providers and geographical locations is not incentivized. For this reason we spawned the Collator Program at Zeitgeist, which encompasses backing of 25% of all collators by Zeitgeist, however under additional constraints, such as having to adhere to a blacklist of server providers and geographical locations. The tool that is proposed here can help us immensely to monitor those key metrics for decentralization and evaluate how effective the collator program is in that aspect.

We strongly back this proposal.

Hi! This Proposal may be discussed on the Live AAG show tomorrow on youtube but certainly if you join us.

It begins at 4:30pm UTC. The link to join live to discuss this spend proposal is here.