we're seeing a shift from central (meta/twittter) to decentralised (mastodon/matrix)
aside from ownership, control, use of data, what's the difference?
for me, the difference is about defaults and assumptions made in naive, or initial (alpha) implementations
In a centralised system, the operator has centralised cost, and needs to offset those (cloud/data center charges or operational overheads) by monetizing your data (adverts) or your interest (subscription)
in a peer-to-peer (the older name for dencentralised) system, these costs are a marginal increase in operations of systems run by the user. The amount more processing/networking/storage incurred compared to having your client talk to the cloud is little (possibly even a decrease, since your peer group may be nearer).
so you don't need to run a business to pay for the infrastructure, because that is a given.
so then in the central system, it is very easy to data mine/run AI on all the users. It would take a lot of work to provide fine grain access control and cryptographic protection of privacy for all users - Privacy Enhancing technologies to allow such things would involve Homomorphic Encryption, for example, which would be a large increase in operational overheads. And would need to be implemented and deployed
so then in the decentralised system, users share only the data they wish, only with the other users they wish to share with. It would take a lot of work to design a decentralised data mining system to build models of all the users (e.g. some large scale federated learning, perhaps also using multiparty secure computation or the like).
so if you start decentralised, you are likely to stay that way for resource reasons, and you are likely to stay private.
so if you start centralised, you are likely to stay that way for capitalist reasons, and likely to stay privacy invasive
of course, the decentralised systems are, trivially, more sustainable. as well.
I know who I'd back, in the long run.
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