A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

As well as https://maidsafe.net/ and https://freenetproject.org/

I did misread that. I think the point still stands. The cheapest server cpus from 2010 are 60% as good as the best 2016 cpus. It might be close to the iPhone 7's latest chip or Google's Pixel. But most people don't have the latest and greatest. A normal phone won't be close to the latest and greatest i7. And I don't think it will be close to a 2010 era server.

> To most people (99% ?) Facebook, Instagram, Google etc offer everything they want.

This is the classic "If I asked people what they wanted, they would've asked for a faster horse" thinking.

There are lots of things people want that Google, Instagram, etc don't offer them. Most people just don't think they're allowed to ask. I know many people who want a better job, people who want to be able to stop living on the street, people who want to eat better, people who want political representation they believe in.

Health, career mobility, and an end to poverty, and good reprentation are maybe acceptable outcomes for specific businesses. But overall the world of business owners is hurt by those things. Sick people spend more money to treat their symptoms, people without job mobility work harder for less pay, poverty forces people to spend the same money over and over again, and corrupt officials can be controlled with bribes. These things are all great for the great core of businesses from Wal-Mart to Coca-Cola to the donut shops, strip clubs, and restaurants on your street.

The way that incentive plays out is complicated, and this is just a theory. I can't prove that there's any kind of permanent system there. But that's how it seems to me.

Decentralized systems don't have that incentive. Ethereum doesn't care how easy it is for employees to quit. Email servers don't care how sick people are.

That doesn't mean those system will necessarily be empowering... "Empowering to disempowered people" is a political aim, and if you want tools to support a political aim, they have to be designed and tested for that outcome. Unfortunately, even though the decentralized tools don't care about the cultural incentives, those of us who build tools on those decentralized platforms do, and we often recapitulate the same incentive systems that Google, Facebook, etc do.

BUT, the light in the end of this whole tunnel for me is that IF you can take "empowering disempowered" as a design goal, and IF you can find some space outside of the commercial incentives to design a tool on decentralized platforms that moves that dial, THEN that tool will actually embody those values, and because it is decentralized it will not be beholden to the standard cultural pressures, and that might actually make a difference.

To some extent this happens every day in in little corners of every product and service in the world. Employees do find ways to enact their values in the work, when they have a little bit of free energy after doing what their boss likes. In theory a decentralized toolset can replace the corporate structure that makes that employee beholden to the boss, making them beholden to algorithms of their choice instead. In theory one of those algorithms would be responsible for keeping them solvent. In theory that could free them up to spend a larger percentage of their time enacting their values. In theory that could create more economic value than doing what an (largely arbitrarily selected) supervisor thinks is right.

But that's a lot of theories.

> I'm not saying it's magic, I'm saying that securing a P2P network is more difficult because the threat surface is much larger and because you have much less control over your stack. At the very least, I (should) have physical security over my own servers, and the intra-DC data links.

With a centralized system you have this:

client1 central server client2

With a decentralized system you have this:

client1 client 2

In the first case, if either client is compromised then the data is still compromised regardless of what happens at the server, because the data still traverses both clients.

And in the second case the "central server" is better than physically secure, it's non-existent. That method of compromise is removed entirely. There are no intra-DC data links to worry about.

> For example, if I find a severe vulnerability, I can immediately patch my own servers. If the vulnerability is in the P2P client, it may be impossible to guarantee that every last client gets patched.

For serious vulnerabilities the solution to this is to push the update with a date check in it that gives people a reasonable amount of time to update their clients, and after that date all of the updated clients refuse to talk to the unpatched ones.

> Because there's obviously an i, wait a reasonable amount of time for everyone to have instnverse tradeoff between control and development speed. Managing distributed state is hard enough when it's on your machines, it's exponentially harder when it's random devices somewhere on the Internet. Your guarantees are much looser.

Only if you're testing in production. If you're the actual developer then you have a test network which is completely under your control, or maybe an isolated group of beta testers who have chosen to allow you to force-update their machines.

> 1. Your data is less local so there is less effective latency.

With a central server the data is on the server and the client has to fetch it every time it wants to do anything. With decentralization you can keep the data closer to where it will be used, e.g. (a copy of) your photos are already on your device.

> 2. You're spending computation and bandwidth that other people are paying for

You're always spending computation and bandwidth that other people are paying for.

If a decentralized system uses 30 seconds of compute time every day from each of a billion devices, probably nobody even notices (especially if you select for idle devices), but do the same on AWS and your boss is going to want to know why the bill is so high.

It requires time to even learn about how to search for a web hosting company.

Just the words "web hosting" are not in most peoples' vocabulary.

You are right that it's good to teach people computer literacy. But your belief that people can somehow spontaneously learn about web hosting is unrealistic.

People first need to experience something, then get some language for what it is and how it works, and only then can they begin to seek out education about how to learn how to reconstruct it for themselves.

Providing turnkey decentralized application hosting is a way to allow people to first experience what it's like to deploy an application. By having that experience and doing it over and over they can start to have shared experiences around it, from which they will learn language about what it is. Only at that point can they start to learn how it actually works and what it might be like to do it in a different way.