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Comment by staplers | Hacker News Reader

  Centralizing control of something that was designed to be distributed

This is human nature/greed unfortunately. Look at any natural (distributed) resource. The current economic system rewards this as well.

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It is not an issue of human nature. Centralization just makes implementation waaaay easier. Distributed systems design is very hard.

There is a failure of technology too. The internet is distributed, sure, but the server-client architecture puts all the operational burden on the server. The expectation that everyone will run their own internet exposed instance of any thing is still simply not feasible, even today. The operational complexity of security, availability, monitoring etc are unmanageable even for technical users. Back when smaller forums were popular, hearing of a forum getting hacked was pretty much the norm. They get hacked, they go down for few days, they come back from a backup losing few days or hours of data, and on to the next vbulletin. Phpbb, nuke, or whatever vulnerability/hack. There doesn’t yet exist a distributed system that can replace something like facebook, twitter, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, instagram, or even WhatsApp without a significant operational burden or added complexity.

It’s also not a very interesting problem to solve because of the type of cliffs you will run into due to precisely how the “internet works”

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