Decentralization is over hyped. People think they want decentralized but they really don't.
There's no reason we have to entrust all our emails/photos/media to big companies that actively spy on us, mine us for more data and in general act against our interests.
If things are convenient enough (i.e.. "just plug in this box into your router and use this address to access your own everything without fiddling with manual backups, network configuration, security, ddos, power outages, spam etc.." ), I genuinely believe that people would prefer that to "trusting big tech with all our data".
I mean i still remember how people made fun of Google for scanning through our emails to show us ads. The price we have paid for convenience is very high imo.
Twitter still exists and is still functional, so why would absolutely everyone move over? I don't think that's ever happened. Every system I've seen where people migrated over elsewhere had it happen over a long period of time.
That's kind of the point, IMHO.
Mastodon doesn't speak for decentralization, it is decentralized. And that's not really splitting hairs here, it's an important distinction.
I could set up a Mastodon instance (although Writefreely[1] and Pixelfed[2] are more my speed) that advocated for centralized everything. I could even ban folks who argue for decentralization and delete any comments they make in favor of same.
It's a tool that allows folks to speak for themselves, without a central corporate authority dictating what's acceptable and what isn't.
If you don't like a particular Fediverse[0] instance, move to another one or set one up for yourself.
It’s like saying “Less sugar is over hyped. People think they want less sugar, but they really don’t.”
Both statements are actually true. My body craves sugar. It’s in my biology. It would eat itself to death if I let it. But the larger system that is me does want less sugar. And to live in a world, where gods producers didn’t operate under the inevitable “if you add sugar they’ll eat more of it.”
If we forget about the web for a second and imagine a mostly analog world, people running small businesses have a ton of things they do without having to rely on centralized services. The reason for that is that there is a ton a small business can do themselves with just a little research. People don't choose centralized over decentralized because they carefully weigh one against the other, they choose centralized because it is the only way they see themselves skinning that cat.
If you ask me, the sole reason for people not running their own services is because the whole world fucked up education around how to actually do that. Someone invented the typewriter and it got a teaching subject at schools because offices needed people who were able to type. We failed to do the same for how to actually use a computer to solve problems. Sure, there are benefits to hand writing, but given that in 2023 much of the correspondence and work happens digitally, surprisingly little thought goes into how to translate this into an adequate education on a big scale.
Decentralization is just the tech equivalent of HOAs.
As such, all I can say is: I disagree. We've had difficulty emerging a resillient reliable & compelling path, but we also have spent so many many orders of magnitude less trying, since inherently most creators want & seek control & arent interested in expanding the viable modes of compute.
What I meant to say was that... everyone wants decentralization but few are willing to take the responsibility if/when something goes wrong because of their own fault.
I wish I had more time right now to contribute to this discussion but regardless of what arguments I present, this debate cannot be solved. It's like a debate on pros/cons of social security. I trust myself to handle my retirement and I wish I could opt out of SS contributions. But no...
We don't need 4 billion little companies doing the same thing, but we need more than 1 or 2.
For example: We don't need everybody running a mail server (although at least the ability would be nice). But we need somebody to break up Google's and Microsoft's duopoly over this.