The web was never decentralized.

Affordability and technical know how to run web and email servers to host content

I think it was just ease of use.

Cult of personality

servers, cloud.

Well, how do we escape the centralization of ISPs? I mean all that bandwidth has to originate from somewhere. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Most people value quality and easy of use over decentralisation.

Great question, and a good intention to think about deeply. I think you may find some very helpful insights in the Xanadu project, what the internet should have been... https://www.xanadu.net/

#[2]​ did a great presentation about the death of dencetralization in smtp https://planb.lugano.ch/the-death-of-decentralization-in-smtp/

Four things I can think about: * technical knowledge barrier (most people have no idea or the will to setup, run and maintain servers) * ISPs split upload/download speeds favoring download by far making it less favorable to self host * incentives: people unfortunately do not value privacy enough...

Me thinking one pitfall is if a general gossip protocol is added to nostr big corporate centralized relays could capture the routing market.

No historical basis to go off of. The industries around the internet moved fast and provided immediate conveniences to the public while the companies made big money fast. Little thought went into the effects of how it was built. imo

Effectivity, scalability. There is only limited amount of use-cases that heavily benefit from decentralization, immutability and censorship resistance. Same way as timechain is great invention for the purpose of money. But probably not for anything else...

The thing that will prevent a lot of people from using nostr is lack of ease of use None of this is that difficult, but it’s a barrier most people won’t want to figure out. Some ppl have a hard enough time figuring out how to add a pfp to FB. They’re not going to go to nostr.build But as mor...

I don’t see building centralized services on top of decentralized services as a problem. The economy/market is decentralized, and companies are centralized entities that exist on/within it. The perception of centralization of “Web2” really comes from a minority of Web2 services like social m...