… let’s start with decentralization.
It’s easy to understand since email is a decentralized and federated service we all use, or used once.
Decentralized means everybody can send email to anybody, and in turn receive email from anybody. All these emails are stored at your inbox and outbox.
Sounds natural right?
But if you check your networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, Tumblr, Tinder, what else? — they are all centralized.
Which means no one from Facebook can send or receive a Tweet; you can’t read your Tinder messages in Messenger. Half of your music is on Spotify, another half in Apple Music. Your friends’ music is on Google Music so you can’t access them.
Every piece of content is walled into their respective owner’s garden without any ways to interact with each other, grow freely, and grow the authors.
But wait, who will pay for it, and with what currency? Up until now you’ve paid with your attention to ads in exchange for the data you’ve stored on Facebook. That’s why all these old social networks were closed and ”free”.
In fact, they were data hosting companies where the currency was advertising and attention. And they’ve closely guarded their assets — you – with logins everywhere, separating you from other networks.
…, monoliths are decomposed into micro-services, and either you stay small for free, or have to pay to more, more, and more to get on the train of the ever growing new and handy services.