> Decentralization is going to happen. I wonder about that. If you think about it, Parler isn't particularly "decentralized", either. It isn't Twitter, but i

> Decentralization is going to happen. I wonder about that. If you think about it, Parler isn't particularly "decentralized", either. It isn't Twitter, but it is controlled and curated by a fairly arbitrary authority. In theory, if you didn't like Twitter's rules, and you didn't like Parler's rules, you could just move off to another competing service - if you or somebody else started one up (easy) and did the legwork of advertising it far enough that enough people used it to make it useful (hard). True decentralization would be something like Tor, I2P or Freenet, where all the users cooperate to share bandwidth and there's no plug to pull and no central dictator to ban content. However, truly decentralized services have been around for a long time now (I seem to recall installing Freenet once in the late 90's), and they have yet to catch on. As much as some of us fear the power of central planning, it seems as though the majority of people like knowing that there's nuclear kill switch that can be pulled if the communication platform gets to be too contentious.