Naw, decentralized means not having everyone on one platform. ActivityPub-enabled sites (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) can be run by just about anyone, and can serve multiple users.

So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.

We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.

We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.

> We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.

This is not and was not ever true. IP was explicitly designed from the start to be difficult to operate without centralisation because the telecoms operators wanted to maintain their "monopoly" on communications infrastructure.

That is why IP insisted on not separating the interface address from device/service identity despite knowing ahead of time this would make multihoming a nightmare (as it did with ARPANET) and despite this problem already having been solved by CYCLADES (it being basically the one feature they explicitly avoided adopting from CYCLADES).

That among other things.

This is in large part why BGP is and always has been such a clusterfuck. There were known issues ahead of time but they were willfully ignored as they made relying on the heavily centralised telecoms operators essentially always the path of least resistance.