Doing many things, including filtering spam, is more difficult in a decentralized environment. (It is curious that email, itself decentralized, has come to be dominated by several large service providers; I wonder how much of this is due to economies of scale for fighting spam and other attacks relative to other economies of scale relative to things not characterizable as an economy of scale? Search of documents published in a decentralized manner on the web is another example.) Many things are even easier in a completely centralized manner, thus G+, Facebook, Twitter, and their morbid predecessors. For all their issues, architecturally decentralized email, web, and internet are much more valuable than the 2011 versions of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy silos. So thank you to all working on making the next bits of decentralized architecture work. I imagine it is possible to do a bit of this work at Google et al, but it is clearly way, way down the priority list of any such companies.
These older posts are also fun http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January... http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe...
Doing many things, including filtering spam, is more difficult in a decentralized environment. (It is curious that email, itself decentralized, has come to be dominated by several large service providers; I wonder how much of this is due to economies of scale for fighting spam and other attacks relative to other economies of scale relative to things not characterizable as an economy of scale? Search of documents published in a decentralized manner on the web is another example.) Many things are even easier in a completely centralized manner, thus G+, Facebook, Twitter, and their morbid predecessors. For all their issues, architecturally decentralized email, web, and internet are much more valuable than the 2011 versions of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy silos. So thank you to all working on making the next bits of decentralized architecture work. I imagine it is possible to do a bit of this work at Google et al, but it is clearly way, way down the priority list of any such companies.