people could not be more clear that their preference is for reliable and easy-to-use centralized services maintained by professionals, and not decentralized systems that require a great deal of user expertise
But you are right that I want reliable and easy-to-use services. And centralisation is often one way to go there.
As an interesting counterpoint: Git itself is decentralised and replaced centralised services like Subversion. And that made git easier to use, especially easier to get started with: no need for a server, no need to be online, just do `git init` in any old directory.
A GitHub-clone could be more decentralised, but they'd need to use that decentralisation to drive those other features that people actually care about day to day.
svn doesn’t require a server and there is no need to be online. It works perfectly fine over the file:// protocol.
Was that always the case? I remember it being quite a hassle to set up (following tutorials online), but that was about 15 to 20 years ago or so.
So far, having individual small countries seems to keep the centralisation at bay for longer than just having states in a federation.
(Look at Germany, Austria, Australia, the USA for examples of the latter. Interestingly, the UK is legally not made of federal states, but in practice they have granted more autonomy to eg Scotland over the years. And everyone knows that Scotland would secede and get away with it, if there was a power grab by London. In that sense, they are more federal than the US, where secession is very much verboten.)
It's similar to how databases allow to begin parallel, concurrent, even contradictory transactions, and also guarantee serialized, consistent database state, and rejection of invalid updates, at commit time. Both aspects are utterly important.
Portable VCS is simple. Portable anything with the integration everyone expects (issues connects to source which connects to builds which connects to releases) is hard. Git being so open and portable means it isn't a moat.
Then it'll be up to the nerds who manage to cobble together their own distributed version of everything--even if it's a significantly reduced definition of everything.
Or, if it's a political scenario, it may depend on how well we can coordinate en masse without the cut connection. If we can exceed a certain threshold then we'll have removed the incentive to cut it in the first place.
Decentralization can be hidden from the user, it's an implementation detail.
There's literally a popular decentralized social network.
It's less about the tech, and more about the execution.
Historically we can look at LimeWire or PopcornTime as an example.
Both decentralized, both popular due to the ease-of-use.
No there isn't. Not a single one.
There are a few federated social networks, which is a fancy way of saying that they are centralized networks that have (or can have, in principle) more than one "center".
In practice, the overwhelming majority of users of such networks gravitate towards one or a handful of large providers. And many of those providers actually refuse to federate with other providers unless they follow an ever-growing list of politically-charged rules. This is just centralization with extra steps.
If you don't account for the benefit, it looks irrational, but this is true of absolutely anything