The comparison to email (SMTP) is telling. I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it'

The comparison to email (SMTP) is telling. I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it's effectively centralized by an ogliopoly consisting of Gmail, Outlook, AWS, and whatever Apple calls its iCloud offering. If, like me, you run your own `maild`, you basically have to work incredibly hard to keep the ogliopols happy. You are always one bad DKIM keypair away from death. And the system is set up like this because, back when it was truly decentralized, it nearly collapsed. Centralization saved email. As much as I hate the ~ Big Corporations ~, they have preserved my ability to send and receive email. And what's more, I'm old enough to remember how NNTP (usenet) did, in effect, collapse, despite Google's attempts to rescue it. The dream of somehow doing away with: central banks; central social media; central servers, etc. is deep in the Internet's DNA. So is the pragmatism that comes from having tried all that.