Things you can do with diodes

> ... There is a positive charge on the n-side and a negative charge on the p-side.

How completely unintuitive.

You can blame Benjamin Franklin for that. By the time we figured out the mistake, the standards were set in stone.

It would be like this either way.

The N side has negative charge carriers. It has a positive charge in the depletion region because the charge carriers are missing. Likewise, the P side has positive charge carriers, and when they’re missing, you get a negative charge.

This is true whether we live in the current universe or live in an alternate universe where we say that electrons have positive charge. The depletion region is where the charge carriers are missing (depleted), so you get the opposite charge of whatever the charge carriers are.