I really hate how cryptocurrency has sucked all the air out of the room with decentralization. The two are only somewhat related.

Well it's the only one that's really taken off. The fediverse started to get bigger until mid-sized nodes started making ban lists and the largest nodes left, meanwhile nothing new is happening with torrents and chrome killed off native peer-to-peer libraries when they started being used by YouTube competitors

As much as I personally dislike how crypto has been pitched it's the only field where decentralization has really entered the mainstream

The things you list seem actual examples where decentralization did take off, but faded once people recognized the tradeoffs of other features implied by decentralization and the mainstream audience chose that they do not really want decentralization - i.e. it's not that it did not yet get a chance to take off, but rather that we-the-peopled tried it out and practically found out that for most use cases we prefer centralization.

I’ve tried to get into the fediverse many times. Every time the thing that stops me is stupid little problems of the sort that keep me in the Apple ecosystem instead of using Linux. I just keep running into confusing time consuming little issues and while I certainly can figure it out I don’t have time.

None of the issues I’ve found are intrinsic to decentralization in any way. They’re just UI/UX design issues. Nothing about the federated or decentralized design would prevent them from being fixed.

Do you have more in formation about these native peer-to-peer libraries that chrome killed off?

Federation is more fun IMO than the antagonistic, “trustless” crypto ecosystem. It’s also generally cheaper to participate in, whereas crypto nodes and miners will only get more expensive as it scales.

Hear, hear! I see no reason why can't we go back to sharing information across sites on many domains hosted on a number of small servers, like in the 90s. For example, having a Raspberry Pi in every home. This sounds like decentralization to me.

Seems feasible. As Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB ram, 64GB flash, ethernet (for a DSL or cable modem), and wifi could meet most peoples needs for file sharing (like dropbox), gmail like web email, chat (matrix or similar), etc. Trick is it needs to be robust, trivial to use, and pushed by a well recognized name to get decent market share.

Ideally they would find each other via a DHT and even offer to trade services (storage, backups, replacing a down service, etc.)

Having these in a decent fraction of households would help mitigate the usual downsides of P2P (slow transfers, slow startup time, etc).

Decentralization starts with self hosting. We are going far away from it, if everyone is relying on cloud services.

Totally agreed and Local-First software is the way to go inspite of the clouds.

[1]https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

> Ink & Switch is an independent research lab working on this problem.

Wow! Bookmarked.

The article confuses miners with mining pools. Each pool can have hundreds of contributing miners, who are free to switch mining pool any time.