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> There aren't any decentralized alternatives to Facebook, Google, or Twitter because nobody's been able to ship one. This makes it sound like a technical prob
by matt_kantor 12y ago
> There aren't any decentralized alternatives to Facebook, Google, or Twitter because nobody's been able to ship one.
This makes it sound like a technical problem, but it's also at least partially a market problem. It's much more straightforward to squeeze revenue streams out of centralized walled gardens like these than decentralized equivalents.
- api 12y agoTrue, but this is at least partly balanced by the fact that decentralized systems cost considerably less to operate. With my own example, I've already calculated that I could handle over a million concurrent users on a few hundred a month in hosting costs. If I had to relay all that bandwidth it might be hundreds of thousands in costs. A decentralized Facebook would have less revenue, but also negligible hosting costs.