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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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fsflover ◴[31 Aug 25 08:03 UTC] No.45081355[source]▶
> Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform

It's a wrong interpretation. Since they leave, they obviously care. They just don't know that decentralized platforms offer long-term solution.

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1. immibis ◴[31 Aug 25 15:22 UTC] No.45083871{4}[source]▶
It's a common mistake of programmers to treat business as something long-term. Saying "don't do XYZ because it'll stop working in a year once they catch on and block you. Business leaders are stupid for doing XYZ." Yeah, so that means you still made a profit for a year, and business leaders are not stupid for doing it. A year later, there could be a different thing that will work for another year. Changing what you do every year or even more often is just normal business. You don't have to find one thing that works indefinitely.

Maybe social media is like business.