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Are we decentralized yet?

(arewedecentralizedyet.online)
487 points Bogdanp | 2 comments | 30 Aug 25 19:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.398s | source
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bjourne ◴[30 Aug 25 22:59 UTC] No.45078743[source]▶
So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.
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1. madeofpalk ◴[30 Aug 25 23:10 UTC] No.45078818[source]▶
> except tracker sites

There are loads of different tracker sites. Many private. If one goes bad, others pop up to replace it. This is decentralised - there is not one player that strangles the ecosystem.

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2. diggan ◴[31 Aug 25 00:16 UTC] No.45079184[source]▶
> There are loads of different tracker sites

Not to mention the mainline DHT. Not impossible or even very resource hungry to run a scraper/crawler/listener and be able to search via it, like bitmagnet (https://bitmagnet.io/) that has some fun pipe-dreams like federation of indexers and something like an decentralized private tracker.