alt Hacker News>In an alternate universe, messaging on the Internet could have been:
I don't think so, and I think the very reason is because the people who opt for these decentralized solutions never really sit down and try and design a product, they just want decentralization for the sake of decentralization. For them decentralization is the product. Your alternate universe evaporates when you ask the question "what happens if Alice's device is offline?".
If you squint, the exact system you are describing is e-mail, and that has become effectively centralized, and it happened long before we had tech mega corps.
The issue with email is that too little is specified, and is instead just left up to providers and clients.
This specification vacuum forces centralization because the only way to build essential usability features is to own both the mail server and the mail client.
If email had evolved to move with the times such that basic QoL features were part of the spec rather than proprietary extensions, then it could have stayed decenteralized.
Contrast with what happened on the web. Yes it's imperfect but there is a standard that evolves to move with the times and there are multiple implementations of that standard.