[echelon]

AWS wouldn't exist if the web had been P2P.

If YouTube was based on BitTorrent.

If Facebook was based on Diaspora, Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, etc.

If Messenger was based on Matrix.

Centralized platforms make ad revenue, form moats, and become big business. Hosting isn't their core competency, so they outsource. Thus AWS.

[evgen]

Speaking as someone who was actually there, this is a delusional view of what might have been based more on fantasy than reality.

The web _was_ P2P at the start, but it became centralized because that was more efficient and increased both value and communication. The original social networks (BBS and chat channels, Usenet, etc) _were_ distributed, but it turns out that this made them easy prey for parasitic and toxic actors and all of the available tools to prevent this imposed asymmetric costs on the recipients and did not scale at all.

Distributed systems are easy, but making distributed communication systems not suck is incredibly hard. The Internet is a distributed system that was a lot better before all of you showed up and cast us into the hell of eternal September.

[warkdarrior]

Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to do decentralized discovery/recommendation. Google Search centralizes discovery for the web, Facebook centralizes discovery for the social graph, YouTube centralizes discovery for the videos, Whatsapp centralizes discovery for chat.