One question I've had for fediverse people is how you prevent a federated system from centralizing. I am legitimately curious. Email is often given as an example, but imo that a perfect example of a decentralized system BECOMING centralized. Sure, other players exist but the vast majority of people are on gmail, apple, or outlook (which is much smaller than the other two). Things tend to follow power distributions due to the momentum force being critical. In network systems (e.g. twitter,facebook,HN,email,ISPs,Walmark,etc) the utility/value is not linearly proportional to the userbase, but super-linear (this was one of the big problems with cryptocurrencies too. "Gotta have money to make money"). In these systems resources are "attractive."
So with this in mind, how is a decentralized paradigm any different than an attempt to just reshuffle the top players? (i.e. re-centralize but with a different group at the top) I just don't see the mechanism that prevents centralization.
One question I've had for fediverse people is how you prevent a federated system from centralizing. I am legitimately curious. Email is often given as an example, but imo that a perfect example of a decentralized system BECOMING centralized. Sure, other players exist but the vast majority of people are on gmail, apple, or outlook (which is much smaller than the other two). Things tend to follow power distributions due to the momentum force being critical. In network systems (e.g. twitter,facebook,HN,email,ISPs,Walmark,etc) the utility/value is not linearly proportional to the userbase, but super-linear (this was one of the big problems with cryptocurrencies too. "Gotta have money to make money"). In these systems resources are "attractive."
So with this in mind, how is a decentralized paradigm any different than an attempt to just reshuffle the top players? (i.e. re-centralize but with a different group at the top) I just don't see the mechanism that prevents centralization.