We centralized a decentralized communication system too. (eMail)
Decentralization just doesn't work too well in practice for whatever reason. Everyone is behind a NAT/firewall, everyone has low computing power, its hard to regulate, etc. This all leads to a centralized solution being easier.
I think the current best thing we have is centralized but open source and encrypted, which gets an "okay"/10 from me.
> Decentralization just doesn't work too well in practice for whatever reason.
Because it's inconvenient. Centralisation is convenient, it gives a single discovery and synchronisation point. Decentralisation makes discovery much more difficult, and requires adding separate synchronisation mechanisms. It generates friction and cognitive overhead.
Even more so for "side-services". Sure your VCS is nominally decentralised[0], but what about bug reports? Contributions? Notes & docs? There were distributed bug trackers efforts back in the early 10s but… they didn't really work IME, they were not convenient or practical.
[0] though even without a single giant point of failure, most project would still have a single canonical master copy, a really mesh/distributed contribution system is very rare (Linux's tree of integrators/forks is probably the closest?) and none of the current VCS makes mesh/point-to-point collaborations really convenient
Decentralization just doesn't work too well in practice for whatever reason. Everyone is behind a NAT/firewall, everyone has low computing power, its hard to regulate, etc. This all leads to a centralized solution being easier.
I think the current best thing we have is centralized but open source and encrypted, which gets an "okay"/10 from me.