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Comment by goldenkey | Hacker News Reader

The end of the article said it best. It isn't an infrastructure problem. It's a society problem; people want to use centralized services, ie. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc. Muggles don't give two fucks about privacy - idiots aren't usually political dissidents until their food supply gets low or their Snapchat gets filtered by the Great Firewall.

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> It's a society problem; people want to use centralized services

Given the nature of network effects, centralized services will always be more valuable to users than decentralized services.

Exactly, no technology will change human nature. Take all of history as an example. Technologies that don't fit our goals are not used and the goals of governments (and their sponsors) always prevale.

People don't want to use these services. People have to use them, as there is no other method. Had the web's been decentralized from the get-go, and someone would come with a centralized service, you'd find the goldenkeys of the world arguing "people want to use decentralized services".

The federation idea seems to be the best way to create decentralization . The problem is that most people working on a type of website usually combine forces and host together. ThePirateBay and Libgen have come the closest to being federation-like. Tons of mirrors and different host names with the same source code and content that is meshnetted across the federation. The only thing that tpb isnt a good demonstration of is divided private data. That is the motivator for most decentralization proponents

Federation does not solve the problem. Eventually most users will flock towards single most popular instance of a federated service. Email is federated, but most users betray it by choosing the most popular provider (Gmail). And Google will happily drop email federation "to protect users from spam" when they get enough user share as they did with XMPP.

Technically email isn't federated. Like the web you have an email server that hosts an email address and all mail to and from go to it, and while you can IMAP to it through a client, and host a "mirror" of it, to send/recieve emails you still need to go through the single email server.

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