the industry aggressively seeks centralization. One browser always ends up taking huge amounts of market share. A small number of sites end up being hubs for large amounts of activity. We then spend forever trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube - federated social networks and chat, stuff like this.

I don't think that's any more ironic than it is to point out that LLVM is backend agnostic, yet we always end up hooking it up to backends that lock the end result to a specific architecture. It's not ironic; it's the advantage of the design.

In git's case, its decentralized nature ends up being an advantage because it decouples centralization from the VCS itself, which has allowed the centralized aspects of code and project management to evolve independently and be tuned to specific use cases.

I think the centralization comes from convenience. Building a good, decentralized UX is a lot harder than making a centralized one (evidence: almost every attempt at P2P networks.)

Physical infrastructure itself needs to be federal. I believe that’s the most economical solution. But it could be virtually decentralized.