there seems to be a growing anger in the internet underground toward good and non-malicious actors in the space like CloudFlare and Signal simply because they chose to build centralized systems, as if centralization is an inherently bad thing.

i wonder how many of those people so complaining also avail themselves of 12-36h amazon delivery.

centralization gives huge efficiency wins. decentralized is not always better.

@sneak There's efficiency wins to be had with centralization, sure, but what people are increasingly sick of is the monoculture and the monopolistic tendencies that seem to automatically go with it. There's been plenty of non-malicious actors that did, in time, turn malicious, and peope are weary. With decentralized services, you can at least move if things start going dick-shaped.

Let's turn your statement around: decentralization gives huge freedom wins. Centralized is not always better. ;)

@doenietzomoeilijk centralized has always been better in practice so far. no decentralized system has ever made an OS that's useful to non-nerds, for example.

@sneak @doenietzomoeilijk also, BitTorrent and the whole *arr suite of applications are better in basically every metric compared to Netflix/Spotify/any other centralized catalog.

@raphael @doenietzomoeilijk depends on your use case tbh. i can't bittorrent on my watch.

@sneak @doenietzomoeilijk but you can watch netflix?

And if you can, why couldn't you have your watch playing streams from your home media server? It should still count as a decentralized system, no?

@raphael @doenietzomoeilijk simply giving netflix $7 is way easier and more convenient than buying, configuring, and operating a "home media server".