because there weren't many alternatives. Dropped calls or latency issues were simply the norm and accepted as a trade off for being able to play. The reason companies used to favor p2p was because it was cheaper for them to not run servers.

But with people demanding more quality, richer content and consistent and stable connections p2p makes not much sense. Look at some Netflix blogs and how complex their infrastructure is geographically as well as in terms of hardware and software to deliver content at the cost to the user that they do.

Division of labor has made sense for hundreds of years and it will continue to do so for many more, the economics of p2p when resources matter doesn't check out.

It's a bad deal for the consumer, though. The complicated Netflix infrastructure is way more robust and stable than SMB+VLC, but I don't need to serve video to millions of people and maintain a complex and rotating streaming library with various publisher contracts determining what shows are available where. I just queue up a show.

Division of labor with companies hosting servers for online games makes sense until the servers go away and then what? No more Warcraft III ever, I guess, the servers are gone.

When we go in on centralization, we lose availability, privacy, and control. The services are more reliable from a technical sense but less reliable from a social sense.

The history of all this has shown us people will choose convenience over those other concerns 9 times out of 10.

Wait, Skype ain't p2p anymore?

Microsoft bought it, removed the encryption and decentralization, and started piping conversations directly to the NSA.

Yup, honestly this is a good argument for web3 as a substrate on which to build an encrypted chat app that's permanently decentralized and owned/funded by the community. (Once someone figures out the encrypted privacy aspect...)

This is coming to Matrix : https://arewep2pyet.com/

Woah, this happened almost two years ago and somehow I missed this.

I need to get more active on Matrix again.

Hasn't been for almost a decade at this point. The p2p protocol was deprecated in mid-2014.

Skype is also pretty much dead now. So the centralisation argument doesn't really benefit from Skype as an example.

Here is a series of headlines that give the best explanation of this architectural change that I've ever seen:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779

People are also fine running their own Discord servers, just like they did IRC channels/networks back in the day.

You're not running discord servers on your own hardware, though. You don't have any of the data locally and it all goes through Discord's server. Actual decentralized services are fine as long as users can run it as easily as they can run a centralized application.

Most people didn’t run their own irc network either, they just operated a channel and backed up the data themselves.