So the question seems to be does the internet going down at the same time outweigh the internet being down for larger periods in aggregate? I don't know, honestly - seems like a tossup.
Is there a better angle to view this from?
edit: My issues with centralization are more about privacy, incentives, points of authority/leaks/autonomy, etc. Downtime seems the least concerning to me.
Yes.
> If that's true for everyone, then the internet will, in aggregate, be down less with CF than if we distributed better.
That depends on what we define as “the internet”. If we use any single service as a point of measure, then “the internet” will have more downtime. But my desire to use the internet is very seldom to use one specific service. Instead, I want to accomplish a specific task, and if my usual service goes down, with any luck they will have a competitor which is still up. This is why I think this alternative is better; it will encourage competitors to exist, which will provide a level of redundancy above the simple network layer.
When something big like AWS goes down, it’s just understood by users that stuff is all broken everywhere. It’s not really an opportunity to get more users just because your thing is still up during this huge outage.
On top of that, if the alternative is less reliable than CF, any marginal gain in users during that outage (users that were only interested in your service because it was still up) will again be lost during subsequent outages for the exact same reason.
Obviously if you need uptime better than AWS, don't use AWS, or use AWS and someone else. The reason people are fine accepting this is because the impact of "50% of the internet goes down" is hilariously unimpactful - 99% of the internet is just not anything to care about.
It’s like with stocks. A single stock I own might go bust, but with a diversified portfolio, I won’t really care. But if ⅓ of all stocks go bust at the same time, that’s a market crash.
