[not_that_noob]

I don’t know man - the Internet is distributed and last I checked it was doing great.

[s73v3r_]

Nobody visits "the internet," though. People visit sites and services on the internet. People aren't going to go to PeerTube because it's decentralized. Viewers will go if there's content they want to watch, and creators will go if they can make money or they can have an audience.

[tCfD]

Distributed and decentralized mean different things. distributed implies a distributor, which is itself a centralized function and in fact the internet has several of these centers of decentralisation that make sure that the grand partitions of high value 'land' assets such as IP address blocks and domain names are apportioned in an explicitly centralized manner.

'Decentralized' as it is commonly understood is about eliminating such central control points and devolving those powers to the edge of the network graph - to individual nodes, or more exactly to individual people.. This never works long-term, and always collapses right back into a centralized hierarchical system.

Information wants to be free, but value wants to be centralized.

[gowld]

The Internet is largely decentralized. Individual nets form peering agreements with each other.

[zajd]

Distributed =/= decentralized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_root_zone

[tCfD]

Yup, people who use the terms interchangeably tend to overlook to custodial and coordination problem solving paradoxes of decentralization and instead think of it only as a trendier-sounding variant of distribution.

[dredmorbius]

Paul Baran's original spec, 1964

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html

[airstrike]

These days, the Internet is more akin to infrastructure than a product per se.