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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by wpietri on Thursday December 20, 2018 @09:57AM (#18725385)
Exactly. I understand the desire for decentralization. There is certainly a lot of hype, and in the cryptocurrency world it verges on religious belief. But I haven't yet seen any examples of the trend reversing.

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.

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