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I agree, but I think "more profitable" is the underlying reason, not "easy." Facebook/twitter/Whatsapp/etc. could be a lot more distributed, open, etc. It woul

I agree, but I think "more profitable" is the underlying reason, not "easy." Facebook/twitter/Whatsapp/etc. could be a lot more distributed, open, etc. It wouldn't be harder. As you said, this is what the internet and www were designed to do. You don't need blockchain, but this is just another example of good decentralization tech that exists. It wouldn't have been hard to make whatsapp open, and/or distributed. It wouldn't have been harder to make it interoperate with other clients, and it would have been more useful that way. It just wouldn't have been worth as much money. Centralization, monopolisation and such are the value, when you go to sell your app to Facebook. Email is distributed because it was invented before centralizing and monopolizing became so valuable. It's easy because there are lots of easy to use clients available. It's open and decentralized because it reached decisive adoption before the dotcom boom. "Easy" to the end user is, by and large, a byproduct. I don't think it's ingenuous to point to a html file, apache and say "there's your decentralized solution."

zepto 6y ago
It isn’t so obvious to me that you can make say, WhatsApp be distributed as easily as making it centralized. It seems like all kinds of things like identity, message routing, nat-traversal etc, are harder in the distributed case a compared with a centralized server farm. It’s also not clear to me that email is a good example of ‘distributed’. For a start most users actually do use centralized email services like gmail because it’s easier, and secondly even in the days before that, email has always relied on DNS, which is at best only partially distributed - i.e. although the participants are in a federation distributed across the network, there are still centralized authorities governing the root servers, the issuing of IP addresses, and of domain names.

zepto 6y ago

It isn’t so obvious to me that you can make say, WhatsApp be distributed as easily as making it centralized. It seems like all kinds of things like identity, message routing, nat-traversal etc, are harder in the distributed case a compared with a centralized server farm. It’s also not clear to me that email is a good example of ‘distributed’. For a start most users actually do use centralized email services like gmail because it’s easier, and secondly even in the days before that, email has always relied on DNS, which is at best only partially distributed - i.e. although the participants are in a federation distributed across the network, there are still centralized authorities governing the root servers, the issuing of IP addresses, and of domain names.