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Comment by fseek | Hacker News Reader

I find it shocking that so many people rely on a single (centralized) source for their communication. The internet was built to be de-centralized (see how DNS, email, tcp/ip works), but now we are moving to a centralized, unreliable means of communication..

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Haven't we been doing that for ages with things like MSN/AOL messenger? Isn't this just an extra means of communication, instead of a replacement as you're suggesting?

Before there was ICQ, AIM, YIM, and AOL instant messenger, there was talk, zephyr and other distributed instant message systems that worked just fine over the internet.

After, there's XMPP.

Most people have no idea that DNS, email, or tcp/ip are decentralized (or even exist).

Shocking, really? The world will not fall apart if I'm not able to see Robert Scoble's foursquare check-ins any longer.

All of the posts on twitter don't come from some single source. There are millions of people posting things.

But there is a single company in charge of the service... if that company disappears or the company servers shut off, your messages will disappear (just as it happens when twitter shuts off).

Don't worry, it will get federated pretty soon. Remember when AOL owned instant messaging?

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but IM is about as far from distributed as it gets. There are only 3-4 big players in a given country, on the high side. Better than Twitter maybe, but just barely.

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