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spaceman_2020

Maybe its because of my crypto years, but nothing tunes me out of the conversation more than "decentralized".

There is no such thing. You can try your best but the laws of human behavior pretty much ensure that centralization and cartelization will happen, unless specifically stopped via outside regulators.

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The best you can get is something like DNS or email, which are "decentralized" in theory but quasi-centralized in practice.

Which is much better than other systems; "twitter but like email" is a reasonable goal.

You can get more decentralization than those services provide, but not without sacrificing usability and/or security.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle

One key to a successful decentralized system is not being able to spam with it; if someone learned how to spam using BGP or DNS we'd all be screwed.

I think when many people say decentralised they mean federated, or something along those lines.

Email and IRC today are, as far as I know, highly centralised, but not in the same way that, say, social networks are.

Even the web is somewhat centralised (and I suppose always has been, to some degree) but it's clearly and successfully federated.

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