I'm sure we have all noticed that the popular trend has been moving towards a few highly centralized, proprietary services. Everything from our methods of consuming content to our messaging services is going this way.
How? and why?
No longer do people have personal webpages, or congregate on a variety of fairly-anonymous websites and forums. Nowadays, a majority of people use social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram (which is also Facebook), Twitter, etc. All of which are filled with copious amounts of Javascript and are dedicated to mining your data as much as possible.
The case of messaging services is even more insidious, and it is where the conspiracy side of this comes into play. People have been moving to services such as Discord and Whatsapp for their messaging needs, whereas before people would use XMPP or Email. Fairly recently, we saw an example of a coordinated attack on decentralization. The Efail vulnerability was a flaw in the implementation of GPG in various email clients, that could potentially allow the contents of (at least) HTML email to be read. When this vulnerability came out, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published numerous articles claiming that GPG itself was unsafe to use, and that users should abandon email entirely and use Signal instead. Signal, although claiming to be for user privacy, is an entirely centralized mobile app that demands your phone number, and the client is hardcoded to connect to a single server. The EFF intentionally misrepresented the issue and on top of that, did not consider things such as XMPP+OMEMO. This cannot have been unintentional. EFF has shilled Signal numerous times before as well.
Thoughts? Why do so many users buy into this centralization meme?
>inb4 blackpiller starts samefagging again