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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Peer-to-peer sharing in the 90s was the best example of decentralization that really worked, grew really quickly and had a massive user base.

Napster was probably the most successful consumer decentralization software ever with something like 25M users in 2001.

Sci-Hub, Torrent video sites etc... are very popular and those are all decentralized with torrents.

So it's not that decentralization can't work, it's that legal structures won't allow it to work, because decentralization doesn't play nice with locking down IP.

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This is the real answer. Decentralized is actually better for most things on the internet, but it is less profitable and harder to control for those on top.

I personally believe time will show decentralized systems winning out on the internet eventually, but it will take a lot of centralized services collapsing under their own weight before we start to realize this. Luckily, this has already started happening.

The examples you listed gained many users because they were (and are) sharing content that they do not own. Imagine peer to peer sharing of personal photos and videos by the users that own the copyright.

The difference in outcome may be due to less economic incentive. It's easy to share photos on instagram and it's much more difficult to, say, download 20 academic papers without emptying one's bank account. There is a cost to the user to sharing photos with instagram. The cost hasn't been realized by the average user.

https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/

I disagree, I think it's because they let users access content easier and cheaper than the standard way.

Music sharing is basically dead because of Spotify, Youtube Red etc... so they solved the simplicity problem, and the cost wasn't worth putting up with the problems of music torrents, which made decentralization benefits moot.

There isn't any reason you couldn't make photo sharing decentralized as easy as instagram, but Instagram isn't photo sharing it's social networking, and decentralized social networking hasn't shown that it's easier/better than centralized.

Hasn't centralized social networking proven to be a complete disaster? The user has become the product.

>locking down ip

that's the golden ticket right there. a meshnet is entirely possible RIGHT NOW but it would entirely destroy the idea of copyright and IP

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