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Comment by _nalply | Hacker News Reader

When many people have the ability to publish independently without relying on a central service, then it’s decentralized. The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server.

In practice, however, this didn’t quite work out. Most people publish through centralized services like Instagram, to name just one.

There are two main obstacles to achieving decentralization. The first is technical difficulty: not everyone wants to learn how to run a web server. The second is reliance on foundational services like domain names and hosting, which can be revoked. For example, if the authorities think you did something illegal, boom, your domain name got confiscated.

So, no, in practice, the World Wide Web isn’t truly decentralized. But at least there remains some possibility for it.

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Thanks. I think we've always had the ability to publish content on the internet without relying on external services, and we still have. It's just not something that most people are willing to do, because it takes expertise and resources, and corporations can do it better by specializing in providing these kind of services. This is why people use them. For the same reason people don't usually make their own clothes, furniture, etc., either. Specialization and division of labour allows us to be much more productive and as a result enjoy a higher standard of living than we would if every individual had to produce everything they consume themself.

The WWW is also not really decentralized anymore because 90% is hosted on one of a handful of hyperscalers. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cloudflare.

Eh, besides Cloudflare, you're pouring money down the drain if you're using any of those. Remember that recent thread where some open source project was spending $100/month on a Vercel database handling 3 requests per minute that could have been a $4 VPS?

Non-hyperscaler server hosting is a pretty competitive business that doesn't need further decentralization at this time, though it's not a bad thing either.

> The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server.

Yeah not really. If the Web was designed to be decentralized it would have used URNs as content identifiers instead of URLs. A URL is specific to a scheme (means of access) and authority (where to access).

A decentralized system would use URNs and any host that could service a request could return the resource. Once a resource was in "the Web" it would be accessible to future requests even if the original source went offline.

This sort of mirroring can be built on top of the Web (CDNs, traditional mirrors, etc) but it is not a foundational component. The authority providing a resource needs to online for that resource to be available.

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