I started to try to understand this debate through a political lens, since it seems so many political people are interested in it's answer. Centralization is a

I started to try to understand this debate through a political lens, since it seems so many political people are interested in it's answer. Centralization is a key tenant to progressivism, largely in the name of efficiency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_... > The progressives' quest for efficiency was sometimes at odds with the progressives' quest for democracy. Taking power out of the hands of elected officials and placing that power in the hands of professional administrators reduced the voice of the politicians and in turn reduced the voice of the people. Centralized decision-making by trained experts and reduced power for local wards made government less corrupt but more distant and isolated from the people it served. Progressives who emphasized the need for efficiency typically argued that trained independent experts could make better decisions than the local politicians. In his influential Drift and Mastery (1914) stressing the "scientific spirit" and "discipline of democracy", Walter Lippmann called for a strong central government guided by experts rather than public opinion. At first I thought, well hell, of course these people are constantly at odds with each other. Then I discovered this on the dangers of decentralization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralization#Criticism > Other challenges, and even dangers, include the possibility that corrupt local elites can capture regional or local power centers, while constituents lose representation; patronage politics will become rampant and civil servants feel compromised; further necessary decentralization can be stymied; incomplete information and hidden decision-making can occur up and down the hierarchies; centralized power centers can find reasons to frustrate decentralization and bring power back to themselves It turns out the answer to this has been studied and sounds like it's somewhere in the middle: https://web.archive.org/web/20150211220702/http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/61430/1/MPRA_paper_61430.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20150211220702/http://mpra.ub.un... 1. Social Preparedness and Mechanisms to Prevent Elite Capture 2. Strong Administrative and Technical Capacity at the Higher Levels 3. Strong Political Commitment at the Higher Levels 4. Sustained Initiatives for Capacity-Building at the Local Level 5. Strong Legal Framework for Transparency and Accountability 6. Transformation of Local Government Organizations into High Performing Organizations 7. Appropriate Reasons to Decentralize: Intentions Matter 8. Effective Judicial System, Citizens' Oversight and Anticorruption Bodies to prevent Decentralization of Corruption How this translates to Fediverse hosts likely matters and is probably worth reading for anyone interested in hosting. My takeaway from this is that the web does need to go back to being decentralized, but a loose yet robust framework, like the one described above, should be in place for providers and community maintainers alike.