Centralization vs Decentralization?

The fediverse is what the Internet was really supposed to be. Each person with their own home servers sharing information, communicating with each other and providing services to each other. Everything decentralized.

The question is how and why we got to this point where that idea disappeared and most of the services are controlled by companies, they are centralized services. Perhaps the centralization of services was imposed on us or perhaps it was the evolution of the Internet itself. The entire emergence of Web 2.0 and technology startups was based on the idea that companies were in charge of providing services, and that their services were centralized, this was largely their value proposition.

If we think of cloud computing services such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc; I think no one questions the value of having a powerful company put its resources at our disposal, and thanks to this, many new companies have emerged (and have also become powerful). The same is happening when a company makes its resources available to us so that we can communicate and have a social life (social networks). So where is the problem? Why does centralization now seem like a mistake?

This leads me to believe that centralization is a feature of the Internet, not a bug. Companies hide the complexity of certain technical details and infrastructure costs from people who cannot afford it. Perhaps the problem is not centralization, perhaps the problem is the interests of those companies to which we have decided to entrust our information. Companies that started with very good intentions and that revolutionized the industry at the start, but that over time have had to put aside the interests of their users to serve the interests of their investors. Companies like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and company that made their users happy from the first moment they were created, people loved them (some still do, others see them as a necessary evil) and yet in recent times they have already stopped from being a unicorn to becoming monsters, vacuum cleaners of information and generators of addictions and consumerism. And this makes us wonder again how and why did this happen?

I cannot give an answer that is an absolute truth, I can only put my thoughts and the analysis that I have been carrying out in this publication. The problem is not centralization itself. The problem seems to be: what is it that defines companies as a product and what are the interests they defend? When these companies started, like most startups that started at that time, they didn't have a defined business model, all they had was a lot of talent and good intentions. Normally these types of projects would have died, however they received the approval and injection of money from many investors. Investors who perhaps already knew how to make these unicorns profitable or simply decided to take a leap of faith. The point is that there comes a point where you have to be profitable yes or yes. How do you make profitable a company in which its users do not pay to use the services? Even more so when precisely their growth is due to the fact that they offer their services for free.

Well, the time has come to define what (or who) the product is. That is when we can attest to the veracity of that phrase:

If the product is free, it means that you are the product.

And so it happened. Users became the product and unicorns became the largest and most powerful advertising companies in the world. As you and your attention are now the product, the algorithms are optimized to retain your attention for as long as possible, generating disorders and diseases that have already been treated by various specialists.

So what is better centralization or decentralization? Well, both approaches are perfectly valid depending on what they are used for. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses. You can choose to develop centralized systems and do good or bad things; likewise you can choose to develop decentralized systems and do good or bad things. Technology itself is completely impersonal, it's just a tool. The problem is not what approach we use or what technology we use. The problem is how the business model of companies is defined, what is the definition of product, who will be the customers and what is the real value proposition of the company.

Always keep this in mind when you are going to use a new product or service, if it is free it is very likely that they are charging you with something much more valuable than money and if they are charging you it is because that is a company that wants to do things the correct way from the beginning, not improvising along the way and harming its users.

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