Servers have a lot of nice features that are hard to replicate in a totally decentralized environment - I say this as someone who experimented a lot with different peering structures for a hobby project.
And indeed, this too seems to rely on persistent nodes, though they don't say in what capacity (whether they work like torrent trackers or if they actually relay content).
In an increasingly mobile-flavored network where one person has many devices it makes sense to have servers. However, that doesn't mean we all need to get behind the mega silos of Facebook and Google. The early internet actually got this right, both technologically and topoligically.
The problem is partly cultural since we have gotten used to the all-or-nothing, anti-federation approach of Web 2.0+, but it's also due to the inability to deliver and change features in a timely manner. But if, say, Facebook UI innovations were to stagnate (and some say that they already have), it would become more feasible to implement a slower-moving federated service.
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Servers have a lot of nice features that are hard to replicate in a totally decentralized environment - I say this as someone who experimented a lot with different peering structures for a hobby project.
And indeed, this too seems to rely on persistent nodes, though they don't say in what capacity (whether they work like torrent trackers or if they actually relay content).
In an increasingly mobile-flavored network where one person has many devices it makes sense to have servers. However, that doesn't mean we all need to get behind the mega silos of Facebook and Google. The early internet actually got this right, both technologically and topoligically.
The problem is partly cultural since we have gotten used to the all-or-nothing, anti-federation approach of Web 2.0+, but it's also due to the inability to deliver and change features in a timely manner. But if, say, Facebook UI innovations were to stagnate (and some say that they already have), it would become more feasible to implement a slower-moving federated service.