Now it would be nice if all the things associated with my identity followed me around between the various decentralised forums, if reputation were more easily assessed and transparently generated, and if all my discussions across the web were accessible to me from a single dashboard.
Still, it surprises me when people say 'decentralised? it'll never take off' since I think it's a big part of why the internet was successful in the first place, and we still have the legacy of that in so much of what we do on the internet. People have been using postal services for centuries. With your phone you can call people in different countries, on different networks, using handsets made by different manufacturers.
If anything, I would say that we started decentralised for good reason, the first generation of attempts to enclose the commons failed because they couldn't generate content as fast as the world. The second attempt was very successful, based on a large influx of money, and network effects but we're starting to see those start to fail for predictable reasons. The lifecycle of centralised services are tied to the lifecycle of corporations and the vagaries of shareholder interest. That will never result in services that can stand the test of time in a meaningful way.
You can tell we're in the pendulum swing back now, because companies are fighting against volunteer labour (anyone who tries to make their systems work with other systems) to make things worse for their own customers. That sort of approach is absurd and not long term sustainable.
