Provider-Exclusive: “There is only the app of my provider.”
Provider-Centric: “There exist other apps, but the one I’m using is the main one.”
Service-Centric: “There is no main one and I’m trying to use the one that fits my ideal the best.”
Protocol/Ecosystem-Centric: “There exist other protocols/ecosystems, but mine is the main one.”
Fediverse-Principle: “There is no main one and I’m trying to use the one that fits my idea of an open ecosystem the best.”
Current state of different web2 apps:
Most problems of the current Fediverse is because of how the Internet was build.
Current Internet has no social identity format, no open micropayment standard, no encryption by default so apps must reinvent their own, metadata leakages, namespaces like IP addresses and domains having centralized control, firewalls, NATs and other roadblocks disallowing most devices to host stuff...
Half of the Fediverse is hosted on Hetzner and the second half mostly on other big providers. User IDs are controlled by server admins. Even Nostr is just a band aid with it's relays doing something Internet should be able to do - send data from device to device.
At least Hetzner is decent.
True. So much Fediverse on them is a problem, but there is a reason why this is.
Really cheap, easy to scale, fast UI, no trackers, perfect IPv6 support, great CLI. And they are not a big tech, just a big hosting provider, nothing that could be against user freedom.
So long as people who care about where their instance is hosted and don't like the big hosting providers can easily find services hosted elsewhere, I don't think it matters too much. But perhaps you can go ahead and start working on plans to some day decentralize web hosting in general and I'm sure lots of people will join in once the worst of the problems at the application layer are solved.