Comment by Fnoord

> The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of bitcoin mining pools, etc.

Eh, I have Gmail, but I barely use it.

Regarding DNS, that's only because the DNS provided by ISPs is being tampered with or runs downright awful.

What happens is people copy each other's behavior. X (friend of Y) starts using Facebook. Friend of X starts using Facebook as well. But X never looked into the alternatives (who has the time for that plus everyone is using Facebook); its only because of other people that they started using it. It is called the network effect [1] though we can thank the early adopters for feeding that hype. I see it as a sign of capitalism/optimization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect