1 link tagged with all of: infrastructure-costs + decentralization + protocol-design
Click any tag below to further narrow down your results
Links
Every decentralized protocol sacrifices on at least one axis—identity, connectivity, discovery, cost, or moderation—rather than achieving true decentralization. The useful question isn't whether a system is decentralized, but which centralization point it chose and what that costs you.
- Mastodon centralizes identity (accounts tied to instances that can ban or close), Nostr centralizes cost (98.2% of download traffic is wasted due to 34.6-relay replication), Bluesky centralizes infrastructure (relay and AppView run by the company), and Org Social centralizes discovery (depends on a single relay).
- Nostr's infrastructure is fragile despite claims otherwise: a 2024 study found 95% of free relays don't cover their costs and 144 TiB of data is thrown away monthly.
- Matrix, XMPP, and other federated systems still centralize identity to specific homeservers, meaning account loss if that server closes.