IMO the idea of decentralization is kinda flawed in todays world. I’m going to go on a somewhat long anecdote, but I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. I

IMO the idea of decentralization is kinda flawed in todays world. I’m going to go on a somewhat long anecdote, but I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. I recently swapped email to protonmail from gmail. Why? Because I read an article about the Terraria developer just getting banned and losing his email for no reason. “That could happen to me!” After a long while of using proton (9 months or so) I got really tired of the lack of ecosystem (at this time there were no public apps on iOS or android besides mail) and I still had to use google for my contacts sync, notes, etc. So what I ended up doing is moving all my shit BACK to google from proton (massive headache by the way) and then just self hosted my own email address domain. That way if google ever decides to ban me, I can hop over to Cloudflare and point the email domain to another email provider and violà! One of my main complains with protonmail was that the search function actually kinda sucks. GMails search is so good, and the filters you can make are so easy, I could go on. That’s why google is the industry leader! But why does proton make me feel more comfortable? Zero-trust. Proton doesn’t know what is in my emails at rest, but google does. So I propose the idea: why decentralize? Compare mastodon and Twitter (pre-Musk). The whole reason that Twitter got huge is that everyone is on it. I loved the old school “everyone had their own message board community” internet, and IRC was really cool. But the VAST majority of users don’t want that back. It’s much more convenient to load up discord to talk to people than an irc client that has like 40 different segregated communities, in the same way that it is much easier and more convenient to use Twitter than to manage all of what mastodon is. Even then, look at something like Session (the username only fork of signal). I’m not 100% on the details, but they claim to be decentralized, but yet I don’t have to input server details. That means that there has to be some sort of centralized database or application or table that tells me where all of the servers I can connect to are (or perhaps a first server that you connect to that then spreads to another server etc) You have 4 choices in the modern world: google (nothing protected, totally centralized, but the most feature rich and fastest) protonmail (centralized, protected, but not as feature rich and fast) session (decentralized but there’s still a layer of centralization to make it easy to use, but still more complicated than the first two options) Mastodon (fully decentralized but wildly inconvenient for the average person, significantly more difficult to use, and likely will never adopt the number of users that Twitter has) Remember, we are the minority. Google is the best for most people, as is Twitter, as is Discord, as is iMessage or SMS, etc. People use what is the easiest and most feature rich. Decentralized stuff will never meet all categories of feature rich, fast, and easy to use. It just isn’t possible, and if it was it would be the biggest smash hit in history and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.