[cj]

I see your point, but do all those network level improvements mean much to the end user when so many critical services live in datacenters owned by 1 company? Many of which in a single region on the east coast, that goes dark at least a couple times a year for hours on end?

[betterunix2]

Some perspective: in 1986 the Internet experienced a congestive collapse that reduced the useful throughput by 3 orders of magnitude. End users noticed, and if it happened today there would be pandemonium.

The Internet has become so robust and reliable that end users take the network for granted. At this point most of the headline-making incidents involve services running on the Internet, not the Internet itself (at least in the US, EU, and other highly-connected regions/countries; there are still countries that can be taken offline by just one cable being severed, and their Internet users cannot take the network for granted yet). In my adult life there have only been a handful of significant, global outages/reductions in service quality on the Internet itself. Regional outages happen from time to time, though few are significant enough to make national or international news.

So yes, network-level improvements mean a lot to end users -- they mean that end users can rely on the network itself, and only have to worry about problems at higher levels of the stack.

[catlikesshrimp]

I love the internet as it is today (facebook and google aside) the system is reliable enough for us. But the discussion is about centralization. This is not about infrastructure.

The day facebook was down for a few hours, I was asked why the internet was down. That person uses the internet for fb and whatsapp (also fb) A decentralized communication protocol and a federated social network wouldn't fail completely under the same circumstances.

[Gigachad]

I think that's more a statement about how reliable the current system is where users think their network is down rather than facebook which would be unthinkable.

[meltedcapacitor]

Facebook could also run federated technically, so that it never fails all at once. It failed because they put all the eggs in one basket in some top layer.

Technical decentralization is orthogonal to commercial issues.

[immibis]

If it was federated it wouldn't be Facebook, it would be Mastodon.

If it was federated and Facebook still controlled it, it would still be centralized.

[edoceo]

Is it really that frequent? Or does it just feel huge cause it owns so much?