>And consider we're not on decentralized USENET nodes discussing this. Instead, we're here on centralized HN. It's more convenient. Same reason technical folks shut down their self-hosted PHP forum software and migrate to centralised Discord.
You're contradicting yourself. Why is HN centralized, while a phpBB forum is decentralized? Are you conflating decentralization and being open source?
>Why is HN centralized, while a phpBB forum is decentralized?
There's a spectrum of decentralized <--> centralized for different audiences.
For this tech demographic here where installing some type of p2p or federated discussion tech (Mastodon? Matrix?) is not rocket science, it's more convenient for us to avoid that and just be on a "centralized" HN. I used to be very active on USENET and HN is relatively more centralized than a hypothetical "comp.programming.hackernews" newsgroup. This is not a complaint. It's an observation of our natural preferences and how it aggregates. (Btw, it's interesting that Paul Graham started this HN website but doesn't post here anymore. Instead, he's more active on Twitter. He's stated his reasons and it's very understandable why.)
For the phpBB forums where a lots of non-tech people discuss hobbies such as woodworking, guitar gear, etc., the decentralization perspective is the php forums and the centralization is towards big platforms such as reddit / Discord / Facebook Groups.
I see similar decentralized --> centralized trends in blogs. John Carmack abandoned his personal website and now posts on centralized Twitter.
My overall point is that a lot of us techies wish the general public would get enlightened about decentralization but that's unrealistic when we don't follow that ideal ourselves. We have valid reasons for that. But it does a create a cognitive dissonance and/or confusion as to why the world doesn't do what we think they should do.
EDIT add reply: >Wouldn't comp.programming.hackernews concentrate discussion under a single heading and also be hosted from a single specific computer?
Usenet is more decentralized/federated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#:~:text=Usenet%20is%20t...
> I used to be very active on USENET and HN is relatively more centralized than a hypothetical "comp.programming.hackernews" newsgroup.
How so? Wouldn't comp.programming.hackernews concentrate discussion under a single heading and also be hosted from a single specific computer? This confuses me even further; I don't understand what you mean by centralization.
>For the phpBB forums where a lots of non-tech people discuss hobbies such as woodworking, guitar gear, etc., the decentralization perspective is the php forums and the centralization is towards big platforms such as reddit / Discord / Facebook Groups.
Surely by this interpretation HN is decentralized. It's a special interest (if relatively broad) forum just like those phpBB forums were. I ask again: is HN "centralized" just because you can't spin up your own copy of the software to use it to talk about gardening?