I'm not going for emotional reaction at all. Compared to a dictatorship, a democracy is more complex, harder to bring about, and yet has real benefits for the public, which, to some, justifies the effort. And all of that is also true of open protocols, compared to monopolies. Whatever your feelings, the analogy holds.
My point was that dismissing centralized services by equating with dictatorship was useless. In a true dictatorship, the dictator rules over by means of force, and has no commitment to subjects other than to keep the fear going. Equating that with a capitalist centralized service such as Facebook, twitter etc is not accurate since for them the product is the attention of their users and it is in their best interests to keep the users happy.
Now that is naively optimistic and considering that the people running these organizations are rational. I for one will happily switch to a decentralized version for a service as personal as Facebook ( so long as my friends are on it ). My intention was to balance the argument since it is very easy to take your comment and interpret it as de-centralized is the "total awesomeness".
Clearly, you have strong feelings about this, as you are working on tent. So my question is, have you asked yourself if there are cases where centralization is better ?
