[austincheney]

The web is highly centralized. For example there can be only one facebook.com domain and you need an account to do anything in that walled garden. With an account they will stalk you to death because are the product, not the user.

If it were decentralized then why would I need to go their servers to access my content or the content of my friends. Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive? That’s decentralized. Social media is not.

The web gave this up long ago for advertising revenue.

[jjulius]

>The web is highly centralized. For example there can be only one facebook.com domain and you need an account to do anything in that walled garden. With an account they will stalk you to death because are the product, not the user.

Facebook is not "the web". You can opt out of that walled garden and go elsewhere on the web if you want.

>If it were decentralized then why would I need to go their servers to access my content or the content of my friends. Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive? That’s decentralized. Social media is not.

Because you and your friends choose to host your content on their servers. If it's that important to share something with your friends, spin up your own website for your friend group. Don't wanna do that? Then get a NAS and show them how to log into it to see your photos. There are countless ways for you to share stuff with your friends that doesn't involve using Facebook, social media or walled gardens.

Hell, by virtue of the web being the web, you can "connect directly to [your] friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off of [your] friends hard drive". SSH, baby!

The web remains decentralized, but everyone chooses to remain in walled gardens.

[austincheney]

> The web remains decentralized, but everyone chooses to remain in walled gardens.

So despite how you wish to define the technology there exists maximum centralization.

SSH is not the web. The web is HTTP.

[tbabb]

> Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive?

That, my friend, is called a "web page", and thanks to the open design of the web, literally nothing stops you from setting one up.

[austincheney]

You are conflating a static file from a third party server for some streaming interconnection.

[NikolaeVarius]

> Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive?

You understand this is what Web 1.0 was right?

[austincheney]

How is a third party web server that accepts anonymous requests the same as a private feed directly to the hard drive of a friends computer?

[vitaflo]

You are forgetting the dozen other computers you are routing your request through in order to get to that walled garden, any one of which if it went down would route to a different computer so you could always get to that walled garden.

That's the decentralization of the web. And that decentralization still led to walled gardens, just like it will with Web3 because it's always in a corporations best interest to do so.

[austincheney]

You are conflating the internet, the network, for the web, the application.