>When I talk about decentralization as a practical concern, I'm not worried about users aggregating around good services. I'm worried about whether the architecture supports moving away from or augmenting those services if something goes wrong in the future.I understand your point here but this sounds more like a technical detail and not about social power structure. To your point, I'd also say the combination of DNS and http protocols already allow for people to move their content around the internet (keep the same url) and yet people do care about aggregation around platforms because they don't like concentration of power. So even though you state you don't worry about it, others do. I believe reducing platform power is part of the motivation for p2p video.
>And what I mean when I talk about centralization as a continuum is that the social aggregated behaviors you're worried about are still strictly better under a PeerTube system than they are under a Youtube system -- so there's no point in bashing PeerTube just because it doesn't solve literally every problem.
Btw, I'm not "bashing" Peertube. Instead, I'm trying to emphasize that it would be a mistaken belief to think that a p2p video protocol can stop defacto centralization. (E.g. see history of http protocol on why that doesn't happen.) Instead of thinking about what's technically possible with cache index servers, we should think about what humans typically do that inadvertently recreates centralization that nobody seems to want. A quality cache index server can create a feedback loop that attracts both users and video uploaders which weakens decentralized p2p nodes. If that particular cache server's popularity doesn't really matter because p2p nodes will always be able to independently exist, then that means today we can also say that Youtube doesn't matter because you can already serve videos (AWS, Azure, home server) independently outside of Youtube.
>If I'm removed from a centralized PeerTube indexing service, my video is still online under the same URL, and I can still point users at a different indexing service. If censorship becomes problematic or widespread, users will move to different indexes because the network lock-in of an indexer is less than the lock-in of a social platform.
But people can make the same argument about Google's index search results. E.g. it doesn't matter if your blog or niche pet store got removed from the page 1 of the search results because you can theoretically point users to a different indexing service (Bing, or roll-your-own index ranking algorithm with Common Crawl dataset, etc). The content at the url domain you already own is still at that url. But we both know that answer (while true in a sense) does not satisfy people. Website owners get very upset when they lose ranking or get removed (censorship) from search results altogether. Even though there are technical solutions for people to not use "google.com", it's irrelevant when their mental framework is "power & influence" of Google.
>The emergent phenomenon you're talking about is that sometimes better, faster services have more users than bad services. That's not a problem with decentralization, and that's not a problem decentralization is trying to solve. Decentralization is only trying to mitigate the harmful effects of that phenomenon.
I think I disagree with that but let me expand. If the goal of decentralization is some diversity (e.g. some niche content has a place to serve video outside of Youtube) then your paragraph makes sense. However, if it's the more ambitious idea of "replace Youtube", then yes, it's a huge problem of decentralization that it can't be as fast/convenient/quality as centralized services for normal users. If most mainstream users are avoiding decentralized services because it "didn't solve problems it doesn't claim to solve" -- does it mean decentralization "succeeded"? I guess there's semantic wiggle room there.
>It is not a desirable goal of decentralization to make every node in a graph have the same traffic levels
I never claimed equal traffic was desirable and that seems to be an uncharitable reading of my points.