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Are we decentralized yet?

(arewedecentralizedyet.online)
487 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 19:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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colesantiago ◴[30 Aug 25 20:20 UTC] No.45077700[source]▶
The honest truth is that:

Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation.

At some point, everything converges to centralization.

No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that.

There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization.

Hell, I would even say that threads is the biggest mastodon instance.

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fsflover ◴[30 Aug 25 21:31 UTC] No.45078177[source]▶
> Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation.

Until the platform enshittifies like Reddit and Twitter did.

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immibis ◴[30 Aug 25 22:56 UTC] No.45078724[source]▶
Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform that hasn't enshittified yet. As we are seeing now with Bluesky.

Perhaps the idea of decentralization was incorrect to begin with, an NI hallucination - perhaps it should be all about centralization-hopping instead. I believe this is what Nostr aims for, though I've never used it.

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1. nout ◴[31 Aug 25 01:42 UTC] No.45079592{3}[source]▶
Nostr is a bit different - you own a private key that signs any message (and action, but it's all JSON blobs) locally in your app and then you just broadcast these signed messages to servers ("relays") that cache and relay these to other relays or users. Other users can use your public key to cryptographically verify that the message is from you. The benefit is that you fully own your data, you can later decide to rebroadcast it to any other set of relays. It's common to have e.g. 20 relays connected from your app.

There is a group of people that care and use it and it works well.

One argument could be made here that decentralization also means that there will be variety of different protocols and solutions and that's ok.