Even most of the very technically competent people I know are gradually moving toward central services. I'm part of a co-op of people with collocated servers. We started in 2000. We haven't had a new member in years, and we are gradually losing them. I'm at the point where I should replace my server, and I'm having a hard time coming up with reasons to justify the large capital expense and significant time cost versus moving it to somebody's cloud. And that's not even considering the benefits of moving to hosted services. Not worrying about spam, email deliverability, security patches, et cetera, ad nauseam.
I think part of the problem is that the "decentralize!" crowd is willing to put up with a lot of practical inconveniences as long as something conforms to their ideological desires. Their ideology may be perfectly correct, but until it has practical consequences, most consumers won't shift. So they're going to need to come up with competitive services that are better than the existing ones. Better not just to them, but to regular users.
Regarding your note on the path of least resistance leading to centralized solutions---Glowing Bear/WeeChat is definitely more work to set up than just signing up for Slack. You need a machine that runs WeeChat and get a TLS certificate so that the browser will let you connect securely. That definitely limits it to a somewhat nerdy demographic, even among the HN readers ;)
(Personally, I’m ofc biased, as I’m the dev of https://quasseldroid.info/).
But I think for these solutions to gain more mainstream appeal, we’d need to make the setup much simpler, and work on ideally making it a single-click solution for an organization to set this up for their members. And maybe even provide hosted services (similar to IRCCloud) for the many users that would rather pay than run their own servers.
Now I suspect we'll start seeing clones of facebook / slack etc but with a decentralized backend while offering all the features users care about seamlessly. This might take a while but it'll eventually come.
Even on the technical side, most tech products have convenience as a selling point to being more productive/effective/agile, etc.
Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting.
Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not the same :)
Again, this is looking at things backwards IMO. You seem to imply that there's a slow momentum from a centralized web to a decentralized one when in fact there's been a rather fast momentum in exactly the opposite direction over the past decades.
To me what you're saying sounds like "horses are about to become a very common way of moving goods". Maybe you're right but merely looking at the trend it's clearly not going that way at all.
>The backend is basically figured out at this point and we need to focus a bit more on UX.
You'll have to tell me more specifically what you have in mind there because that sounds very optimistic to me. We've had decentralized "backends" for as long as we've had the internet. The web is mostly decentralized by design. Even DNS is distributed across plenty of authorities for the various TLDs (even if each of them is effectively centralized and not anybody can become an authority).
Email is decentralized. BitTorrent is decentralized. IRC is decentralized. We're collectively moving away from these technologies, not towards them. I'm personally still a heavy user of all three of these things but it definitely feels niche now (email obviously isn't but self-hosted email is).
>Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting.
Which is pretty much irrelevant in this conversation then. It's about the technology people use to share content with each other, not about how Blizzard chooses to update your WoW client. It's a locked-down, vendor-approved way of distributing software from a centralized authority.
>Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not the same :)
It's not the same but it's related. In general if something is truly decentralized then it becomes self-hostable otherwise it's more distributed than decentralized. Anybody can host their Bitcoin node, their Bittorent peer or their email server. I can't host a Facebook node.
Maybe this trend will reverse eventually but I don't really see the signs yet. The Cryptocurrency crowd keeps shouting "decentralization" but they still fail to create applications that can compete with the centralized alternatives in terms of usability, performance and cost. There have been many attempts at making decentralized social networks but they failed to gain mainstream adoption. IPFS works pretty well but again, hardly anybody uses it.
I'm all for decentralization but there's no denying that there seems to be a path of least resistance towards centralized solutions. They're easier to develop, easier to maintain, easier to upgrade and often easier to use.
So for me decentralization is the objective, but unfortunately it's not "clearly the end game".