The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
For the immediate future at least, federation seems much more feasible than wholly decentralized systems. At least for websites &#x2F; applications that are expected to gain any mainstream traction.<p>Building a federated Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon, App Store, etc. that does not have a single point of censorship &#x2F; failure is perfectly doable.<p>Hell, any of those websites <i>could</i> start federation initiatives today if they so wished (Waiting any day now for a Big Name to experiment with a federated model).<p>However from my experience p2p services (IPFS &#x2F; Freenet etc.) still require a combination of technical skill and political awareness (to go out of one&#x27;s way to use a service that is much less convenient -- and to develop for a platform that will make you no money) that the average user does not have.<p>Not to say they have no place: the internet itself was a fringe, nerds-only technology at one point. But it only became a mass phenomenon once uses were found that brought 10x improvement on things the nontechnical user already needed (sending a letter, looking up information).<p>Decentralized technologies (today) offer no such improvement.<p>And let&#x27;s face it, for the average Joe, p2p offers nothing: a p2p service can <i>at best</i> be of equal quality as a centralized service. There&#x27;s no way around it: there&#x27;s nothing simpler and more performant than talking directly to a central host.<p>With federation, the user needn&#x27;t even know the difference.