[hathawsh]

This is all a sign of growth, most of it for the better.

There are now billions of people accessing the web, so sometimes a web site needs the resources of a company like Cloudflare to handle traffic spikes.

Decentralized email has been a victim of its own success: because there is no central email authority, spammers and bots can easily flood email boxes. If you don't mind the spam, it's actually not hard at all to set up an email server, but most people hate spam, so most people don't want to set up an email server. There is no pure technological solution to spam, so we fall back on companies to help manage it.

Thanks for the reminder about Sandstorm. I intend to try it out sometime. I hope it's not dying.

[edraferi]

Sandstorm kind of still there. They discontinued the free tier for their hosted platform because they ran out of money. The founders went to work elsewhere but maintained the project on the side last time I checked.

I think it’s a shame, it’s a lovely concept. The Capability-based security alone is game-changing.

Details here: https://sandstorm.io/news/2018-08-27-discontinuing-free-plan

[inimino]

It's not a sign of growth. Among other things, it's a sign that we have grown complacent about complexity and are not doing our job of keeping it under control.

[WhiteOwlLion]

HashCash.org anyone? Proof of work e-mail.

[cosmojg]

It's such a shame that Hashcash never took off. It solved many of the problems with decentralized messaging a long time ago.