[jona-f]

"Centralised systems were designed with the best of intentions, but were turned against us anyway."

What a weird take. The internet was built fundamentally decentralized but was centralized against us with the worst of intentions. They lost me at the first sentence.

[BSDobelix]

You have to go into the past a little bit. Think about your:

University email, FTP, and terminal server.

The Internet is just a highway. You will end up at a destination.

[goku12]

I think it's a bit of a stretch to include protocols and protocol suites among centralized services. One simple test for this is the question: "How many Xs are there?". For examples, how many email servers, FTP servers or terminal servers are there? Compare that with "How many Facebooks or GitHubs are there?".

Email protocol suite is designed to be federated. FTP is just a file system access protocol. But you could combine it with an inter-server filesystem synchronization protocol/service to make it a distributed federated service. And as for terminal servers,.. well, I don't think centralization makes much sense there. How can you achieve any of these with centralized services?

[BiteCode_dev]

Not against us. Against some of the nerds will. The rest cheered. That's why it worked.

Humans hate friction, they don't want to pay for maintenance and have short term thinking.

Even on HN there are plenty of voices saying they won't even bother using firefox because it inconvenience them.

Can we blame then the normies for choosing integrated easy systems to use?

[goku12]

It really boils down to if the individual cares about freedoms. Some hackers don't care about them, and some normies do. Both of them use centralized and restrictive services. But the former does it by choice, while the latter does it because they don't know any better. But those normies do take an action when they have enough information. How many ordinary people have participated in boycotts and cancelation of subscriptions against corporations in protest of exploitation or for digital detoxification?

It's partially our own failure to be loud enough and get them the information they need.

[BSDobelix]

>Can we blame then the normies for choosing integrated easy systems to use?

With that logic everyone would use the Edge-Browser right? Don't underestimate the "normie" ;)

[TKAB]

Open systems provide plenty of opportunity for smaller businesses to provide innovative and convenient services. What kind of innovation and experimentation other then getting more ads in are the gatekeepers that we have today interested in doing as long as there's no competition?

[lblissett]

I'd read that as "some centralised systems", not "all centralised systems"