A central-hub choice of <i>implementation</i> shouldn&#x27;t be confused with a centralization <i>requirement</i> however.  It is possible for distributed systems to still converge on things (indeed, entire papers have been written on the problem of distributed “agreement”), it&#x27;s just that they must work in a very different way.<p>Indeed, <i>we had this</i>, in the form of NNTP and older news servers; those servers essentially exchanged copies of whatever was posted from around the Internet.  If there were no news.ycombinator.com, there could still be a wide variety of servers that constitute “hacker news” around the world, that come to a <i>general agreement</i> on what the collection of posts should be.  At any instant in time, not all servers will be 100% identical but for all practical purposes they would be.