I’ve heard some new projects are eschewing massive decentralization as a desired outcome, and moving more towards small set P2P networks, given the challenges in moderation, scaling and the evaporating cool effect. Is there any evidence to this, or is it just hearsay?
Is the future moving away from FB/Insta/etc and towards easy-to-deploy Discord-alikes for our circles of friends, perhaps all based on open standards and interoperable? Or is this just wishful thinking? I know FB will not go away tomorrow, but in terms of cultural relevance it might be a thing of the past seeing as the average user is older.
Thanks for any replies, I welcome your insight.
When I look at my groups of “normie” friends and family I find it very, very hard to think of them leaving the big platforms for ones more decentralized. Now, I am inferring this and I haven’t spoken at length about this, but they don’t seem to understand the difference or importance of these alternative platforms. Its just more weird tech shit they don’t want to bother with.
Why go to the alternatives when the big platform is still there, and everyone else is too?
But when I see the strides these communities are making to make it more accessible, and the quality of conversation and content I am seeing on the fediverse, anecdotally, gives me a lot of hope. I can probably convince my wife and a few friends to make the move, but ultimately I think the apathy towards digital life keeps users complacent and exactly where the Facebooks and Twitters of the world want their users to be.
I agree that it’s very hard to teach the theoretical benefits of decentralisation to normies, but the silver lining to how awful the internet has become in 2025 is that we can now demonstrate these benefits in practice.
We can point at Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and all the other platforms and how shittified they have become and how they could personally resist this enshittification if they were using equivalent decentralised platforms.
It would’ve been much harder to have this conversation 10 years ago, at the height of the free money era. But in 2025 you can already see the steam leaking through the seams.
IMHO, if people are going to join anything, be it tech giants’ latest toy or a P2P indie thing, it will be because there is something there that they want. Few are going to switch platforms or tools for technical reasons. The “what they want” will be a combination of “that’s what everyone else is using”, “that’s what the cool kids are using”, “that’s what my job requires”, “that’s what social pressure requires”, and more things like that.
I can’t imagine this happening, because I have no interest in running a chat server for my friends. The last thing I want to do on game night is figure out why message delivery is failing for some people, or debug why my server’s swap usage is at 100%. I already deal with production servers at work, I’d rather let other people manage that stuff for me.
I don’t think there is a marked shift in applications, but I think it’s fair to say there has been an increase in interest in these topics.
Distributed networking is a movements as much of the past as it is of the present. It has deep roots: the web is distributed, email has become more centralized but certainly started that way, DNS is distributed, usenet news is, and the whole internet itself is designed along these lines. The social part of the internet was much more centered around open protocols than it is today.
Then, about 20 years ago, there was a period where peer to peer applications were in vogue, but the impact on the way the internet works was relatively limited.
Centralization has clear benefits to users: it’s more predictable, a global state is easier to think about, running a centralized service can have such rewards the creators can really focus on usability, which also tends to be easier to implement in an centralized system. And it also has immense rewards in money and power to those controlling these systems. So we’ve seen a massive growth in centralization online over the last few decades.
This goes into the major drawbacks of centralized systems, but those are more subtle and touch upon how we humans handle the exercise of power and the distribution of resources: they are political.
So more recently there is an increasing interest among small groups of mostly technically knowledgeable people in internet systems that distribute and diffuse human power rather than centralize and create it. That includes the fediverse (mastodon and such). There’s also the cryptocurrency world, and the “local-first” software movement also touches upon this.
As others pointed out, I think most non-technically inclined people, and even most technical inclined people live in a world where they cannot see this and it’s irrelevant to them. There are powerful forces keeping people on centralized platforms. It’s conceivable to see a political development where more people make conscious choices about the greater information environment, akin to the environmental movement, but that movement is not big at present. For that the problem of centralized systems needs to become bigger, the awareness needs to spread that these problems are in part due to centralization and that there are alternatives. And these alternatives need to keep getting better themselves.