Whats the biggest downside to having all the data? You are responsible for it.
Google, Twitter and Facebook, store and link to data and are therefor responsible for all kinds of things, like keeping porn away from kids, securing data, dealing with privacy, verifying age, dealing with local laws, managing the needs of rights holders, moderating discussions, deciding if Donald trump should be banned or not and so on, all while paying big $ to store all this crap. They are put in an impossible position that is taking a big tole on all of them, and may even give them so many political enemies that they get broken up.
A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.
>A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.
This doesn't sidestep the core problem of curation, though. It depends on the nature of the application, but just looking at ones that involve displaying user-submitted publicly: if you don't have a frontend with some manner of filtering and moderation, the app will quickly be overwhelmed with a flood of spam and illicit activity (ranging from copyright infringement to child abuse).
Things like IPFS work great for decentralized content storage if you don't need to provide any sort of curation or frontend. But if you do, you'll quickly find yourself running what reduces to a centralized platform. Or if you're providing a federated service of some kind, then your users will be the ones who find themselves in that situation.
> A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.
I agree, and I'd love to see Our Decentralized Future happen -- though I worry that 'smart designer' might end up implying one of the following in practice:
(a) smart enough to stick to a design so limited, in terms of P2P communication, that it'll not be a threat to current Killer Apps.
(b) smart, to the point of omniscience, regarding what a judge may decide is the designer's problem.
Google, Twitter and Facebook, store and link to data and are therefor responsible for all kinds of things, like keeping porn away from kids, securing data, dealing with privacy, verifying age, dealing with local laws, managing the needs of rights holders, moderating discussions, deciding if Donald trump should be banned or not and so on, all while paying big $ to store all this crap. They are put in an impossible position that is taking a big tole on all of them, and may even give them so many political enemies that they get broken up.
A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems.