I've lived through a few eras, where open and/or decentralized systems were expected to win (Internet, crypto today). For most users, the critical things are usability and utility, not decentralization.<p>If we care about decentralization, we have to care about these points even more, to make products competitive with what users are used to. Even though many engs I know value decentralization, most people won't choose systems for this reason alone.<p>Just like with Github, there was a bunch of anger before when Slack was displacing IRC. I wrote some thoughts about what we/I could learn from that example:<p>What Open Source Can Learn From Slack<p><a href="https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html</a><p>If you really want to get more cynical, Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" is a masterful look at 20th century technologies (radio, telephone, telegraph) going through the idealism of the early days, to the inevitable frustration when it creates new anti-consumer behemoths.