Comment by tjoff
8 hours ago
Users have no options because... everything has been centralized. So it doesn't matter if users care or not.
Users are never a consideration today anyway.
8 hours ago
Users have no options because... everything has been centralized. So it doesn't matter if users care or not.
Users are never a consideration today anyway.
It is a trade-off between convenience and freedom. Netflix vs buying your movies. Spotify vs mp3s. Most tech products have alternatives. But you need to be flexible and adjust your expectations. Most people are not willing to do that
The issue is that real life is not adaptable. Resources and capital are slow.
That's the whole issue with monopolies for example, innit? We envision "ideal free market dynamics" yet in practice everybody just centralizes for efficiency gains.
> The issue is that real life is not adaptable. Resources and capital are slow. > That's the whole issue with monopolies for example, innit?
The much bigger issue with monopolies is that there is no pressure on the monopolist to compete on price or quality of the offering.
2 replies →
That's just a post hoc rationalization. If the capital owners don't want something to happen then market dynamics don't matter a lick
There absolutely are options but we aren't using them because nobody cares enough about these downsides. bsky is up, with Mastodon you even have choice between tons of servers and setting up your own. Yet, nobody cares enough about the occasional outage to switch. It's such a minor inconvenience that it won't move the needle one bit. If people actually cared, businesses would lose customers and correct the issue.
It’s time to revolt.
More like it's time for the pendulum to swing back...
We had very decentralized "internet" with BBSes, AOL, Prodigy, etc.
Then we centralized on AOL (ask anyone over 40 if they remember "AOL Keyword: ACME" plastered all over roadside billboards).
Then we revolted and decentralized across MySpace, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, etc.
Then we centralized on Facebook.
We are in the midst of a second decentralization...
...from an information consumer's perspective. From an internet infrastructure perspective, the trend has been consistently toward more decentralization. Initially, even after everyone moved away from AOL as their sole information source online, they were still accessing all the other sites over their AOL dial-up connection. Eventually, competitors arrived and, since AOL no longer had a monopoly on content, they lost their grip on the infrastructure monopoly.
Later, moving up the stack, the re-centralization around Facebook (and Google) allowed those sources to centralize power in identity management. Today, though, people increasingly only authenticate to Facebook or Google in order to authenticate to some 3rd party site. Eventually, competitors for auth will arrive (or already have ahem passkeys coughcough) and, as no one goes to Facebook anymore anyway, they'll lose grip on identity management.
It's an ebb and flow, but the fundamental capability for decentralization has existed in the technology behind the internet from the beginning. Adoption and acclimatization, however, is a much slower process.
These centralized services do and did solve problems. I'm old enough to remember renting a quarter rack, racking my own server and other infrastructure, and managing all that. That option hasn't gone away, but there are layers of abstraction at work that many people probably haven't and don't want to be exposed to.
1 reply →