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---
title = "Centralization Through Decentralization"
date = 2023-05-24T20:00:00-05:00
tags = [ "software" ]
---
An opinion piece was recently published in Wired magazine titled ["The Hidden Dangers of the Decentralized
Web"](https://www.wired.com/story/the-hidden-dangers-of-the-decentralized-web/). It makes a lot of basic factual errors, conflates valid reasons to mistrust centralized social media with antisemitic conspiracy theories and grifts, and somehow even manages to make basic security practice out as conspiratorial. I'm not all that interested in giving it the time of day, except for one paragraph that stuck out to me.
> While the platforms offered by Meta and Alphabet are certainly not without issue, it is hard to deny the convenience of their established existence, which makes it possible to communicate, be entertained, shop, and more all in the same place. By contrast, users of decentralized platforms will need to download a slew of apps for everything they want to do online, because these features will no longer all exist in one place.
Even if we accept the premise that you can somehow get by while restricting all your shopping to Facebook Marketplace, this state of things is not even 10 years old. [Facebook Marketplace launched in 2016.](https://about.fb.com/news/2016/10/introducing-marketplace-buy-and-sell-with-your-local-community/) Youtube and Gmail are both Alphabet/Google products, but they come bundled *today* on flagship phones as two separate apps. If you want to see people whose primary presence is on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, Tumblr... you need all of those apps installed. Or you could use your web browser, because each of those is available as a website still (despite what these corporations would want -- they push very heavily on "better in the app!" experiences because it gives them more ownership of what your eyeballs are doing).
That's not the experience you get from decentralization. If you make an account somewhere that runs the Twitter-like Mastodon or Calckey, you can follow people from the other. Or from the 2010-era Facebook-like Friendica. Or the YouTube-like Peertube. Or the Instagram-like Pixelfed. Sign up in one place, see people everywhere. Or so the story goes. In practice, this interoperability is often kind of unstable, but it's better than the literal nothing you get between two platforms owned by different corporations (or even by the *same* corporation; Instagram stories started showing on Facebook ... a few months ago?).
And do you know what I had 10 years ago that I don't now? Literally all of my instant messaging in one place. On my laptop, I had a piece of free software called Pidgin. On this one app, I was logged into MSN Messenger, Skype, ICQ, Facebook Messenger (which used XMPP until 2015), the IRC server for my university honors program, and Twitch chat (which is still [a version of IRC](https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/irc/)). The only thing it didn't do was text messaging, but I carried a phone for that. One application, one unified experience, six accounts that I set up once and barely had to interact with again.
It is not decentralization that results in "app fatigue" as this joke of an article calls it. If you want a centralized experience, you need stuff that's built to work together by design. Or that's hacked to work together, in the case of Pidgin/libpurple plugins talking all sorts of proprietary protocols like the AOL and Windows Live Messenger ones. Stuff built to make money off of you is incentivized to pen you in. Ever tried to use Facebook Messenger from the browser on your phone?
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