But from the early 2000s, with the advent of Web 2.0, we began to communicate with each other and share information through centralised services provided by big companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. It is now on Facebook’s platform, in its so called “walled garden”, that you talk to your friends. “Our laptops have become just screens. They cannot do anything useful without the cloud,” says Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Blockstack, a platform for building decentralised apps. The DWeb is about re-decentralising things – so we aren’t reliant on these intermediaries to connect us. Instead users keep control of their data and connect and interact and exchange messages directly with others in their network.
With the current web, all that user data concentrated in the hands of a few creates risk that our data will be hacked. It also makes it easier for governments to conduct surveillance and impose censorship. And if any of these centralised entities shuts down, your data and connections are lost. Then there are privacy concerns stemming from the business models of many of the companies, which use the private information we provide freely to target us with ads.
I dunno, I remember that era before centralisation, and while it had a kind of anarchic charm about it, it wasn't very good. That's why no-one was using it except nerds. The reason the big corporate efforts have become popular is because they're convenient and they work. Yes, centralised control has its problems, but I'm not at all convinced they'd be any better without it. Does no-one else remember chatrooms on Napster and WinMX and the like ? I don't particularly care to go back to that particular era. Decentralisation's not uninteresting, but it'd take a lot more than warnings about the dangers of Big Internet to get me to sign up. I think it could have profoundly unexpected consequences.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle
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