The original idea of the web was that everyone would be both a producer and a consumer. They would run their own server and connect to the servers of others.
It’s difficult to run your own server. You need to figure out how to get it working. You need networking knowledge to connect it. You need to keep it up to date with new versions of software and security updates. You might even need to scale it which requires even more expertise.
What we learned from Web2 is that no one wants to run their own server—even those with the technical skills to do so. We would rather have someone else figure out how to keep it running all the time and pay them to host our website or content.
Read Web3 First Impressions by Moxie Marlinspike.
See also:
- This is a reason why centralized platforms are popular—convenience is king
- Large centralized platforms have outsized power which raises demand for decentralized systems
- Web3 suffers from the same problem, no one hosts their own blockchain and so you end up with centralized platforms all over again
Links to this note
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Distributed Apps Are Centralized
Blockchains are a server technology. They don’t live on the client and things like a web frontend to a dApp can’t perform CRUD operations without a server. While it’s possible to host your own node, in reality nobody wants to run their own server, not even the ones with the technical skills to do it.