Also, Wikipedia has shown that centralization is necessary sometimes. For example, political pages are frequently locked because people with the most extreme and inaccurate viewpoints are the most vocal.
A decentralized system driving to centralization is much better than centralized overlords having a full control over users in a walled garden reinforced by network effects. As TFA says, "Decentralized networks aren’t a silver bullet that will fix all the problems on the internet. But they offer a much better approach than centralized systems."
> Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be
And it's not necessary as the existing servers federate between each other and allow the users to register normally.
Why wouldn't this happen with web3 servers?
Why doesn't HTTP count as decentralized? Anyone can put a server on the network by buying an IP and domain name. And how does crypto help at all with these basic network effect problems that are the reason previous decentralized systems centralized?
It can happen with them, and it does happen with Bitcoin to a degree. However, it's much better than full monopoly of Facebook and Youtube. By the way, there are still many alternative paid email providers which work fine for those who do not want to run their own server.
>Why doesn't HTTP count as decentralized?
To me it does. But we need more: we need decentralized services on top of it, like PeerTube.
Running your own servers is attractive for some, but they aren’t the majority and never will be unless it requires something as simple as buying a $35 box and plugging it in at home with no additional setup. Social media is hard to accomplish without a centralized discovery server. See Torrents before they figured out a mechanism or Matrix.
The author didn’t address these forces driving web content to centralized platforms, and web3 isn’t likely to avoid the same incentive structure from what I can tell. Bitcoin and Ethereum both have significant centralization problems for how people use them. More wallets are in Coinbase and other central providers than are run privately. Mining power is centralized among a small population as well. Even current crypto is driving toward centralization to get new people onto the technology, so how do you prevent it in web3?