agreed, if you want to look at it in terms of infrastructure then the commonplace ocurrence of people flocking to certain platforms because others are already there also favors the formation of a smaller amount of sites who can sustain the growth needed to give space to what ultimately became billions of people through its snowballing
and now nobody can compete with them, because no one has the capacity to build up once more that spiraling combination of millions of dollars and millions of users, so now they seem to be here to stay with nothing practical beyond them
as centralized as can be

Probably, yeah. I'm sure there will still be pockets of resistance and we're basically on one, but people will always take the path of least resistance and the fastest option as well.

What you quoted sounds like AI generated garbage babble.

>This information is not made available to us as individuals. Even if it were, it would not be the kind of information we could use. It’s only useful en masse—in other words, only insofar as it makes us legible and visible to centralized institutions
what?


>The centralizing trend that we have seen over the lifespan of the internet is not a fluke to be corrected as we learn to properly harness the power of this new technology. Rather, the internet cannot be anything but a centralizing force, so long as there are groups that are situated to disproportionately benefit from that which it renders visible.
what???

I don't understand any of it, but it's gestalt reminds me of arguing in favor of monopolies. I hate it.

>>1341
I do not agree and here is why;

The internet as original designed had two major features that made it very important for the times it was designed in. 1) It allowed two or more computers to talk to each other over unreliable connections. 2) It allowed data to be stored in multiple locations around the United States/the west where it could be recovered if needed.

Never forget the internet was originally designed in the cold war era with the goal of ensuring that no matter what happened there would be at least one location left that would continue to run the Government and jump start other computers/server should they be destroyed or knocked offline. It was designed in a way that these computers could communicate even over the most spotty and slow connections. Landlines, radio links and even through single sideband Morse code if needed.

The TCP/IP standard itself has several built-in features designed around there being near unlimited nodes within the global network. All of which are ignored and go unused on the modern internet due to censorship. I assure you the Government's important stuff isn't being hosted like the modern web is hosted (or your personal traffic). The important data is being mirrored in untold numbers of servers and backed up by servers who's only job is to pipe data between them.

In fact, the internet and software running on top of it always works better, faster and is more stable if you take advantage of the inherent duplication features of TCP/IP.

Up until about the late 90s/early 2000s most everything online was designed with this in mind. Standards were followed to ensure different systems could communicate with each other. Data was mirrored in multiple locations whenever possible. Before they turned http into something it should have never been we saw this with all interactive software. Just compare a network of email servers like USENET to a forum, imageboard or modern social network. USENET can never be taken down and even if your local mail server goes offline there are millions others you can connect to with the same content. If you push content to one server in the network it's almost instantly mirrored everywhere. This is very different from modern web applications where you're screwed if the website goes offline. Even if the website is backed by an army of servers it becomes impossible to access it should its reverse proxy/one public IP is knocked offline somehow. Mail servers aren't like that. There are millions of IPs with the same content to connect to instead.

In the late 90s/early 2000s we saw the rise of p2p software. It allowed people to share and host files for free that were mirrored globally almost instantly. We'd been using mail for this for a long time but the new p2p networks allowed you to share large files without breaking them into small pieces. Soon after we saw the backlash from the copyright mafia. They sued everyone and lobbied to have all the p2p networks shut down. So now instead of streaming video from a global swarm of peers you're forced to access it through the web using a service like youtube. Where it can be censored and lost forever.

Centralization was forced upon the internet. The internet was never designed with centralization in mind and it makes everything worse. Some examples;

Even with the censorship issue aside centralization ends up causing far more data to be transported over the limited global bandwidth. In a true p2p network or even a semi-p2p network high traffic data is mirrored on local nodes. Thus allowing the user to fetch it from a server nearer to their location. In a centralized model this data must be transported long distances every time a user requests it. We see companies like google and netflix leasing so-called edge servers in ISP data centers all over the world. This allows them to avoid this problem. But it's a p2p for me and not for thee type of situation. On a free internet those edge servers would host everyone's content. Whatever is viral today would be sitting on them in a cache.

The cold hard truth is they centralized the internet for censorship/control and now they're attempting to justify it by claiming it's a better model. It's not. We've known since the 1920s it's not a better model for this problem. If it were better we wouldn't have designed POTS and radio networks the way we did. Computers are just the same thing with more bandwidth.

Another thing I should mention are protocols. We're supposed to have multiple protocols like http for different uses. We used to have this before "web 2.0". But now everything is forced to run over http. They do that again because it allows them to control content. If your interactive network aware applications ran over a simple protocol that wasn't in the web browser it would cause a lot of problems for them. The last thing they want is multiple standards designed by hobbyist. We've stifled innovation for the last 2 decades all in the name of censorship and control of the global network by a small number of people.

>>1351
Some examples of what you should have right now;

1) There should be a global file system/datastore like IPFS that you can access from any machine and interact with the files hosted therein like they're local files. Anyone taking part in this global file system would mirror a small amount of data for others to ensure it would always be available. Viral files would be pushed to multiple nodes should they become popular to ensure everyone could get them faster and for network stability in general.

2) Instead of relying on multiple streaming services and social networks instead every family/house would have its own personal media server. You could share the contents of it with the global network if you wanted. But the main use would be to store your families media and access it from whatever device you wanted both in the home and while you're away from home.

3) Internet-aware applications would be truly internet aware instead of glorified web browsers. They would behave and run just like native applications. There would be a simple standard to ensure they could work on any type of system

4) There would be a truly free web-like document store+standard to allow anyone to publish content that others could read. It would be impossible to censor or take anything down. Once it's uploaded it's there forever. You could push updates but old versions would always be stored/mirrored somewhere on the global network. Anyone could publish to it for free.

There are many other uses of course. These are just a few. One VERY IMPORTANT point is with a truly free and open internet the copyright laws would have been changed. Meaning all content is suddenly allowed to be remixed. Imagine if every type of content was the same as 2hu stuff. Now imagine a world where people are expressing themselves with it without fear of having it taken down or getting sued. That's the kind of world we should be living in right now.

We should have advanced at least 60 more years in just the last 25 or so during the "information age". We should be living in Renaissance 2.0. We aren't due to censorship and centralization.

>>1351
>We see companies like google and netflix leasing so-called edge servers in ISP data centers all over the world. This allows them to avoid this problem. But it's a p2p for me and not for thee type of situation.
That's the entire point of the article though. Big tech companies can lease a large amount of servers because they have the money and political capital to do so, something which the common don't have. Even though the internet protocol is decentralized, it's a system where every node has equal standing; so whoever can pay to control the largest amount of them have the largest control over the entire system, which in turn gives them even more money and control.

>On a free internet those edge servers would host everyone's content.
No. They host the contents of the ones who pay for it. The internet doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's backed by physical hardware and electricity, which cost money. No one can host significant amount of content for free. Big tech can afford to do it because they sell your data, exactly the article's point. Common persons don't have any capacity to do this, and they don't want to pay either.

>>1351
doggy

>>1353
Energy would be free is nuclear power and other sources of power were not demonized on purpose. What you have to understand is it's a system of control. Money IS control.

We don't have to have communism to have good for the common man. We just have to not let a few people treat us like we're less than people. They stifle innovation to retain control over the population. That's the only reason things are like this.

What we need are laws that say things like:
>All data is free
>Transporting data over the global common network is a human right

If the Constitution of the USA was written today it would say DATA instead of SPEECH.

>Common persons don't have any capacity to do this, and they don't want to pay either.
I pay hundreds of dollars a month to host several TB of content on my home network that I can access anywhere in the world. Even with the current situation it's more than possible for each and every home to have its own little home server. Which churns away hosting and serving content. Both content you put on it yourself and a small datastore where you're hosting content for others.

Hell most ISPs now already let other people access the bandwidth you're paying for. They call it "mobile wifi" or whatever. It allows other customers to log-in to their accounts via the router/modem in everyone else's home.

As they say; you don't know how bad things really are.

>>1350
ZERO reading comprehension ZILCH NADA

>>1353
>That's the entire point of the article though. Big tech companies can lease a large amount of servers because they have the money and political capital to do so, something which the common don't have. Even though the internet protocol is decentralized, it's a system where every node has equal standing; so whoever can pay to control the largest amount of them have the largest control over the entire system, which in turn gives them even more money and control.
whats the point of the OP then? because this sounds entirely political.
It's not inevitable.
It's ABSOLUTELY something that should be corrected.
It's not at all inherent to the internet.

>>1341
that's just a consequence of capitalism and market economies in general wherein all the various currents of technological innovation flow upwards towards oligopolistic control and contribute to the overall consolidation of capital... every product in a society is endemic to the means of distribution of goods and services which in our case is the market, therefore the market bleeds into their design through the profit motive in general and the selective pressures thereof...

the link between technology, its design, and the overarching sociopolitical framework is interesting and variegated... there's an influential book called tools for conviviality by ivan illich that explains how tools, technology, can morph into something bad based on the overarching structure of society. ivan illich influenced lee felselstein in the design of the osborne 1 personal computer, so if there's a fountain from which the computer freedom ethos stems, it's probably that. illich is also one of the founders of modern political ecology along with andre gorz who i also recommend reading.

https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/

you should read about federalism and anti-federalism in the context of the american constitution as it provides insight into how america went from a confederated government to a centralized one and how the federalists co-opted the term federalism to begin with. a lot of melancton smith's arguments in the brutus papers for why centralized government sucks still ring true and predicted the rise of the administrative state as a whole.

overall i just think that palladium article you posted is mired in assumptions, understandably so, because when you live in a capitalistic frame you tend to take its principles as first-principles. for example if what makes information usable or intelligible is its accessibility by centralized institutions, then that's because they're centralized institutions not because the information has some intrinsically centralized nature. and even moreso because those institutions are subsidized by a centralized government, thus performing the will of that government, serving as its arms and legs... academic research feeds into the market and the market uses it to consolidate capital by means of the competitive process, the government gets its taxes and with those taxes it can buy more money into existence in the form of bonds from the federal reserve. this exacts the government's plutocratic interests and over time morphs society into one big funnel of wealth from the poor to the rich... terraforms the landscape, the system of objects, into objects of a capitalistic import, of a mass-produced nature, of a centralized nature etc... i think that's the proper way to look at it.

If anything this little 4chan outage has proved to me that decentralization must be achieved over anything. All the splintering has caused the alts to grow and each foster better communities than 4chan had. The rest of the users went to either reddit or twitter. So what this tells me is that anyone worth their salt on a larger website will go find a suitable alternative and fit in there, while all the shitheads will gravitate towards the biggest garbage can they can find.

What this convinces me of is that more big websites need to be taken down so that we can fix the internet.

>>1341
>the inherent property of the internet leads to the eventual centralization of control:
even doe literally everyone can run their own server and ip masking and daisychain solutions like the blockchain can ensure anonymity and consistency across an entire decentralized internet

>>2941
A crypto evangelist in the year 2025 wwwww

Consider posting again when you learn something about technology from anywhere other than the /g/ board on 4chan.

>>1341
Not really. I think it's pretty evitable. Case in point: sites like the one we're on right now.

Wtf is that wordsalad you quoted? I would try to refute it but it makes no sense.

>>2949
people are flooding to this site and others like it BECAUSE one of the big centralized sites died, and yet most users have anyways gone to the OTHER big centralized sites! if you think that refutes the op in any way, you are terminally dumb

>>1341
>The Centralized Internet Is Inevitable
Blocks your path

>>2951
Well the site existed before 4chan died and it will exist after it is revived

>>2951
4chan's fall demonstrates exactly why big centralized sites aren't practical for healthy communities. 4chan will always be a tempting target for attackers because it's so big and hosts so many different communities. Other big sites are too, but they have herds of cattle they're farming that can generate enough of a profit to fund their own defense. 4chan didn't.
Big centralized websites have to be extractive and exploitative in order to defend themselves. Networks of smaller websites don't, because one node in the graph going down doesn't take out the whole community.
"Most users" will go to the other big centralized sites, sure, but "most users" are cattle and don't matter for the kind of thing real people should be trying to build.

>>2942
crypto uses blockchain, it's not the same thing dummy
maybe you should do some cursory reading on how it works before complaining about it lol

>>2963
No he's right. You've bought into a myth and you should really spend more time learning about networking before parroting some opinion you read elsewhere. Blockchain technology is not new nor does it help 'preserve content' or 'ensure a censorship free internet'. It is simply another ponzi scheme. Like AI and a lot of other fads that have popped up in the tech sector over the last decade.

You want a censorship free protocol? See IRC. See Email. See USENET. See Fidonet and so many others. All of which have been running since the 60s-80s and can not be censored. All of which are still working right now and allow you to communicate and publish content that anyone in the world can see. Most of which don't cost you anything as a user because there are thousands/millions of servers just waiting to receive your packets and mirror them forever.

Through Fidonet I regularly post in threads with people from North Korea. North Korea! That's how censorship free the network is and it's just a collection of old BBSs that 'federated' as the kids would say. They 'federated' way back in the mid-80s. The network supports both public and private discussion threads as well. I find lots of good discussion and information on it today. It all goes straight to my local mail client. I can access the content from anywhere in the world from most every device I own. Including my old computers running stuff like CP/M as the OS.

This 'blockchain' nonsense is typically a cyrpto-coin scam tacked on to some other software or website. It has produced nothing of value. Things like "Web 3.0" are total scams and again they allow for an outside party to control what you publish. They waste tons of energy. They will not do things like 'kill the Fed' either. They are not private or anonymous. It can be tracked by anyone especially the 'powers that be'. The only thing that will come out of it is a new global currency that allows the Government to monitor each and every purchase you make. Along with tracking other things they consider valuable to track (like your daily habits). People holding things like bitcoin now think they're smart and have beaten the system. In reality their access to their 'coins' can be taken away at any time and it's impossible for them to purchase anything with them anonymously as soon as cash is phased out. I could speak at length about blockchain and the various crypto coins and the problems with them. But I won't go further at the moment. If you can't see what's happening you probably aren't worth my time to explain it to anyway. Just know horrible things are coming soon and if you want to see what's coming take a peek at the day-to-day life for Chinese citizens.

We solved the publish/censorship problems a long long time ago. We've had working protocols and software for that for decades before you were born. There is no reason why we can't make new protocols in the same spirit or make existing ones easier for non-tech people to use. The issue is there is _no profit in it_ and it doesn't allow one party to control the movement of data. It's also harder to track people using those protocols. Hence why all the major tech companies have phased them out and avoid building on top of them. At least in the respect where they're used properly instead of limited to a handful of their own servers.

The internet itself can never truly be anonymous anyway. The infrastructure is built in such a way that requires that it knows which computer is sending data to another computer. It's similar to the problem with radio transmission. Where we could be fully anonymous in our transmissions if sending encrypted data over public bands wasn't illegal. But we still give away our location when we broadcast no matter what we do. In addition it's easy for one party to disrupt use from transmission and receiving via jamming. Hence why the Government(s) locked the entire spectrum down long ago and heavily punishes anyone that doesn't follow their rules. We've only given little slices of it to play with like HAM and CB. Where we can't really do anything interesting due to lack of bandwidth and laws against using things like encryption.

If the internet was actually designed as intended we'd have high bandwidth links all over the world that allows us to transfer as much encrypted data as we wanted. Real encrypted data too not this 'encryption' we have now where there are multiple backdoors into every CPU and the protocols/cypher are designed broken on purpose. Internet access would be a true public utility and sharing data over it would be considered a human right. Where no one could be censored for their speech or from the data they were hosting. There wouldn't be a handful of parties controlling things like domain names and SSL/TLS certificates. The web wouldn't be the abomination it is today and would be used as intended (sharing mostly text/images as static content). We'd have other protocols for things like sharing/streaming video/audio and for other kinds of content. Everything would speak a common language/protocol so any device no matter how underpowered could participate. There wouldn't be a yearly upgrade cycle due to companies breaking old hardware on purpose.

If you'd like the see what kind of world we could have been living in right now read about the TRON project and various papers written by Ken Sakamura and others.

>>3164
>>3164
>No he's right. You've bought into a myth and you should really spend more time learning about networking before parroting some opinion you read elsewhere.
I didn't read past this because you're obviously reacting emotionally based on its length, how about you go look up how blockchain works, maybe then you can divorce it from your preconceived notions of cryptocurrency. Literally just don't respond to this reply btw it doesn't matter.

>>3164
Crypto is why I can still buy stuff off DLSite.

>>2939
this

>>3180
>I didn't read past this because you're obviously reacting emotionally based on its length
Ah I see. You're one of those people that think anyone that posts something beyond a few words is 'mad'.
>how about you go look up how blockchain works
Its not like I've been up to speed on what it is since the late 90s or anything. It is not a new concept.

You signed a piece of data and a bunch of other computers in a stupid network 'verified it'. Wow. Such a breakthrough!

>>3181
Not for much longer.

>>1341

This is what billionaires like musk want you to believe

All media except social media is legacy, all small sites are invalid, please flock to my shitter megacorp controlled social engineering hub so I can monitor your thoughts and control you. Everyone does that and it's inevitable, you wouldn't like to be behind the trends now, would you?

>>3164
>The internet itself can never truly be anonymous anyway. The infrastructure is built in such a way that requires that it knows which computer is sending data to another computer.

I have a truly anonymous internet, I think.
For some reason my ISP doesn't know who I am.

I have their router and keep using their internet, without paying any bills. I called them and turns out I don't even exist in their database, not my name, nor my address. Probably some administrative error happened, it's a long story, basically I was hooked to the fiber and signed the deal then it was cancelled but the connection is still coming through.

If someone tracks my IP down, all they have is IP range. If the government wants to track me down, they would take my IP and go to the ISP ask who it belongs to. And all the ISP will be able to say "we dunno, someone is using our internet from this internet range but we dunno who".

I don't know how it works, it just does. It's been over half year, no bills, still have the internet.

>>3210
How do I get this lucky? That's fucking awesome, Anon.

>>3210
gotta love incompetent sysadmins and developers hired straight from India without a care in the world.

>>3211
>>3212
I'm feeling this luck is kinda wasted on me tho, as I'm not doing anything illegal other then some innocent torrenting.

>>3192
>Wow. Such a breakthrough!
Yeah it kinda is, because it makes the internet decentralized unless an individual body holds more than 50% of the entire blockchain (which would immediately be excised) to put it in terms you can understand. That means it's impossible. Retard. You're just embarrassing yourself, man.

https://geti2p.net/en/
Compared to something that hasn't seen any real non-currency use case outside of speculation and dreams, I2P seems like a far better solution to the problems that plague the net.

>>3230
It's true isn't it. Name one widely adopted use-case that's not crypotcurrency.

>>3231
https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2019/05/28/cma-cgm-and-msc-to-join-tradelens-digital-shipping-platform
https://www.dock.io/post/blockchain-verification
https://opentimestamps.org/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9739765/
https://xage.com/
https://techlife.novonordisk.com/cases/epid
https://www.kaleido.io/
this is all just surface level stuff and frankly I just sniffed out through a google search but I imagine you'll claim that nascent applications of novel technologies don't count as widely-adopted enough. Because it's not that old, you know? Airlines are or were recently still running on windows 3.1/95 (ambiguous per this article: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-31-saves-the-day-during-crowdstrike-outage I'm sure you could find a more concrete answer if you looked further) so it's not surprising that tech isn't advancing as quickly. Plus one of the major and most obvious uses for blockchain would be implementing open verification of records and reports for audits or titling which takes the government and businesses out of the middleman position, which is why it has been suppressed for so long and will likely continue to be suppressed.

>>3231
He's a shitposter from 4chan, it's obvious from the first post with "even doe". The links he just dropped are a bunch of solution in search of a problem stuff about "zero-trust" and so on.
>>3164
Good post, you've put to words a lot that's been lingering in my mind.

Your idea of the internet as basically a repository of static files, in particular, is how I imagine should be the basis of the internet. I dislike the very idea of "websites" in the first place. For instance wikipedia if I had my way would simply be files hosted on decentralized repositories, that you download and open on your .wiki reader.

But it is hard to imagine an internet outside of this one, truly outside the box, isn't it?
I will make sure to look into the TRON rabbit hole.

>>3233
>even doe
that's a soysphere expression, actually.