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Are we decentralized yet?

(arewedecentralizedyet.online)
487 points Bogdanp | 2 comments | 30 Aug 25 19:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.402s | 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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hoppp ◴[30 Aug 25 23:45 UTC] No.45079016[source]▶
Well git was not really an attempt at decentralization so there is that.
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1. not_kurt_godel ◴[30 Aug 25 23:57 UTC] No.45079084[source]▶
And in many ways it actually is remarkably meaningfully decentralized - or perhaps "effectively" decentralized - in terms of every node having a full working copy of entire repositories that can be trivially cloned to another provider or stood up on a self-hosted server.
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2. forrestthewoods ◴[31 Aug 25 00:14 UTC] No.45079177[source]▶
I’d say the opposite. Git is defacto centralized. And I’d go further and say that attempting decentralization is the biggest problem with Git. It maybe makes sense for Linux. But for 99.999% of projects it makes everything so much worse.