Would you say the decentralization features of GitHub are lost in world where few truly make use of those features? Do you think things have a chance at swinging back that way or have the "hubs" of the world won?
Hubs are extremely convenient for business processes. They make it easy to write a lot of features that people want to use on a day to day basis.
Note that only git can be decentralized, not github. Most of our decentralized protocols deal with very limited things: BitCoin is a financial ledger, BitTorrent is a protocol, there are some Dbs, but limited. Consider now that GitHub offers git, issues, authentication, wikis, searching, etc... I don't even think we have enough combined knowledge on how to make that decentral.
Not all things need to be decentralized. It's mainly required for critical things that need to work in the face of disaster and free from snoopping or interference. There are plenty of good use cases here, like Internet fundamentals (traffic and DNS), chat programs, file sharing, Tor network, etc.
What might be some examples of decentralized systems offer efficiency. In a lot of these examples that component is traded away for robustness or privacy. Are there good examples of things becoming more efficient due to decentralization?
That's a good question, and I don't have an example. Distributed computing has many examples, but generally removing "master" or "coordinating" nodes almost always has a performance impact.
In real-world processes (non-computing) I think there are several examples. This usually results though becuase the central nodes, government or corporate, are sluggish to respond to their distributed "field" agents. Being able to act independently is certainly a boon in such processes -- though they ultimately report to a central authority as well.
In computer we tend not to have central servers that are so sluggish as to be a bottleneck. When they are, our response is to duplicate them, and keep duplicating them.
There are lots of ways to improve decentralized efficiency, but I guess efficiency is just not a reason you'd choose decentralization.
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Would you say the decentralization features of GitHub are lost in world where few truly make use of those features? Do you think things have a chance at swinging back that way or have the "hubs" of the world won?
Hubs are extremely convenient for business processes. They make it easy to write a lot of features that people want to use on a day to day basis.
Note that only git can be decentralized, not github. Most of our decentralized protocols deal with very limited things: BitCoin is a financial ledger, BitTorrent is a protocol, there are some Dbs, but limited. Consider now that GitHub offers git, issues, authentication, wikis, searching, etc... I don't even think we have enough combined knowledge on how to make that decentral.
Not all things need to be decentralized. It's mainly required for critical things that need to work in the face of disaster and free from snoopping or interference. There are plenty of good use cases here, like Internet fundamentals (traffic and DNS), chat programs, file sharing, Tor network, etc.
What might be some examples of decentralized systems offer efficiency. In a lot of these examples that component is traded away for robustness or privacy. Are there good examples of things becoming more efficient due to decentralization?
That's a good question, and I don't have an example. Distributed computing has many examples, but generally removing "master" or "coordinating" nodes almost always has a performance impact.
In real-world processes (non-computing) I think there are several examples. This usually results though becuase the central nodes, government or corporate, are sluggish to respond to their distributed "field" agents. Being able to act independently is certainly a boon in such processes -- though they ultimately report to a central authority as well.
In computer we tend not to have central servers that are so sluggish as to be a bottleneck. When they are, our response is to duplicate them, and keep duplicating them.
There are lots of ways to improve decentralized efficiency, but I guess efficiency is just not a reason you'd choose decentralization.