<story><title>June 2023 Data Dump is missing</title><url>https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390023/6212</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benrutter</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know that I agree. I think most people don&amp;#x27;t care about decentralization but they do care about the effects it brings.&lt;p&gt;Email is a great example where most people wouldn&amp;#x27;t be interested in a version of email that only let&amp;#x27;s you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation network is a clear value add that people care about.&lt;p&gt;The main issue from my perspective is that we only have a select few large tech companies that operate as monopolies so are effectively able to block out new decentralized protocols from coming to be.&lt;p&gt;RCS messaging is a great example which I think most people would use over alternatives like WhatsApp and Imessage except that apple refusing to support it locks a huge fraction of the market out and stops widespread adoption being possible.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s a question of preference, or people being uninterested. It&amp;#x27;s just a boring and repeated story of corporate monopolies intentionally reducing consumer choice.</text></item><item><author>the_pwner224</author><text>A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all; the centralized systems are easier to sign up for and use. It&amp;#x27;s been demonstrated over and over and over again.&lt;p&gt;Even if the underlying tech is decentralized, the community will settle around one or a few big instances (for example, Gmail and GitHub) which often end up having significant control over the trajectory of the entire ecosystem. If you run your own email server and you get put onto Google&amp;#x27;s spam list - you&amp;#x27;re fucked.</text></item><item><author>lumb63</author><text>This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide the platform, and store the data. We need to rethink this model.&lt;p&gt;The thought and knowledge of communities and users need to belong to those communities and users. To people they intentionally and thoughtfully delegate to and trust. We need to decentralize our communications, like how the internet used to be before the arrival of social media and mega forums. We need to revert to small, focused forums, with less anonymous, more persistent communication, run by people we trust. Otherwise, we will continue to see mega companies harvest our data and use it (or not provide it) against our wishes. If we don’t work to mitigate that dynamic, we have nobody to blame for the poor outcomes but ourselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slg</author><text>&amp;gt;Email is a great example where most people wouldn&amp;#x27;t be interested in a version of email that only let&amp;#x27;s you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation network is a clear value add that people care about.&lt;p&gt;That is only because those technologies predate those companies.  Normal people don&amp;#x27;t care that you can&amp;#x27;t DM a Reddit user on Twitter or that your Instagram posts don&amp;#x27;t automatically show up on your Facebook page.  People are generally fine with centralized corporate platforms as long as it isn&amp;#x27;t a restriction of a previously free technology and the network effect has done its thing to attract enough people to the platform.</text></comment>
<story><title>June 2023 Data Dump is missing</title><url>https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390023/6212</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benrutter</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know that I agree. I think most people don&amp;#x27;t care about decentralization but they do care about the effects it brings.&lt;p&gt;Email is a great example where most people wouldn&amp;#x27;t be interested in a version of email that only let&amp;#x27;s you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation network is a clear value add that people care about.&lt;p&gt;The main issue from my perspective is that we only have a select few large tech companies that operate as monopolies so are effectively able to block out new decentralized protocols from coming to be.&lt;p&gt;RCS messaging is a great example which I think most people would use over alternatives like WhatsApp and Imessage except that apple refusing to support it locks a huge fraction of the market out and stops widespread adoption being possible.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s a question of preference, or people being uninterested. It&amp;#x27;s just a boring and repeated story of corporate monopolies intentionally reducing consumer choice.</text></item><item><author>the_pwner224</author><text>A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all; the centralized systems are easier to sign up for and use. It&amp;#x27;s been demonstrated over and over and over again.&lt;p&gt;Even if the underlying tech is decentralized, the community will settle around one or a few big instances (for example, Gmail and GitHub) which often end up having significant control over the trajectory of the entire ecosystem. If you run your own email server and you get put onto Google&amp;#x27;s spam list - you&amp;#x27;re fucked.</text></item><item><author>lumb63</author><text>This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide the platform, and store the data. We need to rethink this model.&lt;p&gt;The thought and knowledge of communities and users need to belong to those communities and users. To people they intentionally and thoughtfully delegate to and trust. We need to decentralize our communications, like how the internet used to be before the arrival of social media and mega forums. We need to revert to small, focused forums, with less anonymous, more persistent communication, run by people we trust. Otherwise, we will continue to see mega companies harvest our data and use it (or not provide it) against our wishes. If we don’t work to mitigate that dynamic, we have nobody to blame for the poor outcomes but ourselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grumpymouse</author><text>I think things like  being able to contact anyone are important to people, but decentralisation doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily provide that (e.g. if I sign up on a Mastodon instance will I be able to see the messages of everyone on every Mastodon instance, and will they be able to see mine? Will I even know if somebody I care about can see my messages or not?)&lt;p&gt;I think decentralisation is not a selling point to most people. It&amp;#x27;s an implementation detail that they&amp;#x27;re happy to go along with but it&amp;#x27;s a negative if it make the experience worse, makes everything more complicated, if they can&amp;#x27;t talk to the people they know IRL, etc.</text></comment>