[colinsane]

i’m feeling like i don’t understand the language around this recently. Lemmy/Kbin takes 1000’s of previously disparate forums and brings them into one UI and identity system: isn’t that more “centralized” than the old phpbb/forum way?

i mean architecturally it’s nearly as decentralized, but from a user point of view that’s not the part that matters. construct the Napster UI atop a decentralized architecture, and it’s all the same right? heck most large websites today are internally decentralized (sharding, load balancing, …) if you peek inside them: the real difference here is not that a service is distributed across machines, but across machines with different owners. it’s really more of a political distinction, the UX could be identical, it just isn’t (quite) due to preference or limited labor.