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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.