Which isn’t to poo-poo the project, GitHub adds a bunch of extra features so I can see why someone might want to build up on it. It’s just funny, the winding path our files take to get to our eyeballs.
I guess the decentralisation aspects of a given technology just means it's a resilient building block. And since the only way we make sense of things nowadays is through markets, it's inevitable we starting building and consuming centralised services.
I'm not saying centralisation is good or bad btw, but I do share the irony in your reply, mostly because I find it funny when a new tech is being sold as new way of doing something in a decentralised way.
If everything is already covered without such freedom, or you don’t care about what’s not covered (or failed to conceive it), then you don’t really mind having the freedom or not. It doesn’t change much.
Gmail is a good email client — email being decentralized is only relevant to me if I wanted to get off gmail to go to say fastmail. But if I didn’t, what do I care whether the underlying protocol is centralized or not?
Disagree, or at least think there’s a need to clarify. This makes it look like a freedom is only occasionally relevant.
This kind of freedom derived from decentralization also exists as a persistent threat against bad behavior. If users can leave and bring their stuff with them, that constrains the choices that the platform can even consider.
Attempts to centralize should be seen as strategic attempts to change the landscape in a way that makes it easier to exploit users.
We did the same thing with email but we prefer Gmail.
We did the same thing with Usenet but we prefer Reddit.
We did the same thing with IRC but we prefer Slack.
We did it with shitcoins but we prefer Coinbase.
Turns out people really don't care much for pure decentralization. There's money to be made recentralizing decentralized whatever.
Ofc centralised/decentralised is also part of the UX (what happens when the centralised service goes down), but so far it's not been a net win for decentralised.