[jen20]

That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.

[croon]

I agree with you on the technical premise, but I think the point made was that the bigger the disruption, the greater the backlash and swift reversal, in ideal theory at least.

[JumpCrisscross]

In theory. It’s strange to argue about hypothetical issues with something currently defending against actual problems. One battle at a time.

[handoflixue]

I'd hardly call decentralization a "hypothetical" issue: we've already seen governments are willing to issue gag orders so that we can't even find out what they're doing inside major companies. That's clearly a lot easier to do when there's a single central point of control.

If there's a single central point of control, then that also means an outage takes everything offline, instead of just 1-2 tools. That also makes it a bigger target for attackers.

[throwaway290]

So do you apply the same logic for measures gov/Apple/etc put out about on-device scanning and e2e messaging stuff? It's always "hypothetical" until it hits the fan.

[josephcsible]

Sure, I agree there are bad things about extreme centralization. I'm just saying that the increased collateral damage of censorship is a silver lining of it, not one of the bad things about it.