Ask HN: What's stopping decentralised applications from taking over the world?

The advantages of centralised applications seem to outweigh the advantages of decentralised applications. Off the top of my head... Ease of use, cost, everything is in one place, low or no maintenance. These are all pretty powerful factors that can't just be ignored if you ask me.

The current, easiest, internet business model is user surveillance. If you facilitate people interacting between each other, without needing yourself, makes it harder to monitor their movements.

But there are successful apps like torrents and crypto currency. Bitcoin was extremely successful, and revolutionary. There are also successful enterprise decentralized apps.

And further, for example, bitcoin was created by someone, but it does not, and cannot, belong to anyone now.

So you would have to come up with a new, good, and stable, business model, revolutionary even. And also a good federated model for content discovery, to unify the user experience, or community.

In the case of Element, it would be the people in charge of Google's Play Store: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964226

I should think that the solution should be open protocols (and not too complicated). They can make them both centralized and decentralized as wanted (especially if the protocol supports that use).