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So, Microsoft Edge now comes with an equivalent to Apple’s Private Relay, just without Apple as a middleman between Cloudflare and Fastly. Neat. On the other h

So, Microsoft Edge now comes with an equivalent to Apple’s Private Relay, just without Apple as a middleman between Cloudflare and Fastly. Neat. On the other hand… I have to hand it to Cloudflare, they’ve done a great job turning themselves into the internet’s second backbone. (AWS might as well be the third backbone.) It seems that decentralized systems always centralize over time when it comes to mindshare, and really don’t like decentralizing. Like, once the network effects begin even slightly, it becomes irreversible quickly. Linux is still not beating Windows and Mac. Mastodon’s numbers are still tiny compared to Twitter. Bitcoin hasn’t really hurt banks. The internet started out fairly decentralized, look at it now. I’ve come to the conclusion that people just do not like decentralized anything, period. Which is unfortunate.

pocketarc 3y ago
> always centralize over time when it comes to mindshare Yeah, you're absolutely right. Companies grow, and people talk about them, and get other people to try them, and they grow more, and more, until it becomes the "default" option that everyone knows, and they become entrenched by sheer power of their mindshare. Especially in a global world where these brands become larger than life. There are brands with more global recognition and soft power than most countries out there. Most people go with the defaults. That goes for software as much as companies. It doesn't matter how many decentralised options you have, because mindshare is what matters. Being the default in people's minds is what matters. You need hosting? AWS. CDN? CloudFlare. Git? GitHub. Video? YouTube. And so on. There -are- options. But people aren't going to bother, when they can just... go with the default. It's not about people not liking decentralisation, it's just much more mental effort to research and explore options when you can just go with the default.
mdasen 3y ago
> So, Microsoft Edge now comes with an equivalent to Apple’s Private Relay It's only 5GB for free. Microsoft doesn't have a paid option yet so we'll have to wait and see what that costs.

pocketarc 3y ago

> always centralize over time when it comes to mindshare Yeah, you're absolutely right. Companies grow, and people talk about them, and get other people to try them, and they grow more, and more, until it becomes the "default" option that everyone knows, and they become entrenched by sheer power of their mindshare. Especially in a global world where these brands become larger than life. There are brands with more global recognition and soft power than most countries out there. Most people go with the defaults. That goes for software as much as companies. It doesn't matter how many decentralised options you have, because mindshare is what matters. Being the default in people's minds is what matters. You need hosting? AWS. CDN? CloudFlare. Git? GitHub. Video? YouTube. And so on. There -are- options. But people aren't going to bother, when they can just... go with the default. It's not about people not liking decentralisation, it's just much more mental effort to research and explore options when you can just go with the default.

mdasen 3y ago

> So, Microsoft Edge now comes with an equivalent to Apple’s Private Relay It's only 5GB for free. Microsoft doesn't have a paid option yet so we'll have to wait and see what that costs.