A decentralized web would give power back to the people online
Decentralized services have not been able to compete with their walled garden counterparts due to lack of resources and access to capital, as well as the coordination costs of federation. It&#x27;s a structural and not a technical problem. I can&#x27;t see how this will ever change.<p>Most decentralized services are open source projects maintained by volunteer developers. They are competing with centralized commercial projects with deep pockets and the ability to hire not only smart developers but also artists, testers, sysadmins, designers, marketers, researchers, and project managers - some of the things you need to deliver a best-in-class service to users. The odds are stacked against the decentralized service from the beginning.<p>Even when these projects attract commercial interest, such as Dat or Ethereum named in the article, it is not clear how their funding will be sustainable given that decentralized platforms are more difficult to monetize than centralized ones. And it&#x27;s really hard to see Github as a &quot;posterchild&quot; for the decentralized web, since it is really a centralized service.