Most users are non-technical so the entire notion is gibberish to them
Otherwise, decentralization imposes performance penalties most deem unacceptable for common use. Furthermore, in the case of p2p, you can end up serving illegal content.
Otherwise, decentralization imposes performance penalties most deem unacceptable for common use. Furthermore, in the case of p2p, you can end up serving illegal content.
The public cannot be confused if you want new technologies to become mainstream. Selling the value of decentralization, something few ordinary people truly care enough to make behavioral or even proactive choices towards adopting, is the wrong strategy currently. That someday will change but it could be a while. The public needs other value propositions like the promise of benefit with little to no effort or mindshare to adopt.
This is similar to why mobile payments faltered (and to some extent still does) in the North American market. Too many players sending out different complex messaging. No unified voice.
Eventually we will eliminate the performance penalties, but mass adoption or demand for a decentralized web will require a complex multi pronged approach that includes education and extensive value adds which are easily understood.
On the performance side, I think that depends on what's being attempted and how. MaidSafers like to reiterate the notion that popular content will have chunks cached more broadly across the network, but that is only one aspect. There are other things that are not intuitive about how to develop a distributed application with no central authority. And their current model does not include sharing computing power (no Function-as-a-Service type of thing); just storage and bandwidth.
The problem is that moderation doesn't scale. Small communities and small instances will nearly always be better at moderation than a large platform, because they can rely on a small number of individuals to get the job done - individuals who are more likely to be consistent, more likely to pay attention to community reactions to posts, and more likely to care in general about what they're doing.
It's difficult for me to think of any large platform (Facebook, Github, Twitter, Reddit, Steam, Amazon, etc...) where moderation and general content quality is better than their smaller counterparts (Mastadon, Itch.io, Gitlab, self-hosted forums, etc...).
Large platforms also become large attack vectors. The same benefits of centralization for users - (content discovery, single sources of truth, and so on) make it very cost-effective and efficient to spam and harass users. With a decentralized system, spammers are less likely to care about whatever small community you're hosting. It's not impossible for them to crawl around the internet spamming everyone, but the cost of doing so is a lot higher than targeting a single platform.
So centralization inevitably leads to large platforms because the market for these platforms is winner-take-all, and it almost a kind of pseudo physical law that large platforms can not be moderated well. I don't want to be absolutist about it, but I'm really having a hard time thinking of even a single exception to that rule.
Maybe Wikipedia, but I'm even kind of doubtful about that - and most of Wikipedia's quality moderation comes from a group of people who are completely obsessed with the project. That mindset also doesn't scale to Twitter/Facebook sizes.
Perhaps there's another comparison to be made? Facebook's moderation, for all its many and myriad faults, is infinitely better than the stuff your average SMTP server sees every day.
Federated decentralized systems are a hell that combines the worst of both centralization and decentralization. It's a great way to offer users the features they want, but at the cost of a set of systems where there's no practical way to stem abuse.
This is great for moderation - Mastadon instances tend to be very focused and to ban bad actors quickly. It's bad for content discovery, because not all of the content is localized in one place.
It's a tradeoff, one that I'm increasingly suspecting is inherent to the debate over centralization, and one that I think might end up being a deciding factor for people choosing which direction they support. If you care about mass indexing and content discovery, maybe you just can't have moderation. If you care about moderation, maybe you just can't have content discovery or mass indexing.
Granted, decentralization is worse for censorship because bad actors can go off and make their own instance, and other people can still subscribe to them. But, censorship != moderation, those are two entirely different concepts that just occasionally overlap with each other.
This is assuming that you're talking about moderation that's more in-depth than just adding a captcha to defeat spammers. With the example you gave of hosting your own fileshare; Facebook has more resources to deal with a certain kind of attack - DOS, XSS, etc... but you're really only talking about a very small subset of attack patterns in that instance. I think federation makes most of those problems go away, because you can standardize purely technical defenses and for the most part they scale just fine across decentralized services.
The moment you start talking about hard problems of moderation like choosing which files you're going to host in the first place, the private SMTP server wins.
When I think about scaling moderation and curbing abuses, I'm not really thinking about the low hanging fruit, I'm thinking about curbing bad actors who are already actively participating on the platform, or who are coming up with novel attacks that don't have any one-size-fits-all solutions.
I think that what isn't immediately obvious when most people consider the big silo websites is:
1) The army of moderators that are constantly fighting to remove illegal, offensive, or commercially damaging content. (Twitter might not care about bots posting lies to sway voters, but it doesn't want a reputation that kids are following fake celebrity accounts that post beheading videos every few months).
2) The fact that these sites, by acting as middle men (and mass surveillance infrastructures), get to calculate people's reputation, which is difficult to export between sites in a meaningful way, and is hard to replicate in a decentralised/federated architecture.
The various communities on Steemit all seem to focus rather passionately on protecting their hashtags and feeds from users or content that are abusive or spammy.
May impose such penalties; can also provide improvements (closer to point-of-use data, greater resiliency etc).