>""The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now."
I believe the context of "The Decentralized Web" here is meant to contrast the increasing centralization of content from FB, Google, Medium, login walls pay-walls etc.
The term "decentralized" is used, because TBL's Web evolved into an effectively very centralized system, at the levels of both logical architecture and data ownership.
Sure your laser printer can serve a webpage. But nobody cares! They don't care to the extent that your printer-page will most likely not even be accessible, given the default settings on your or your ISP's routers.
In practice, most of your - and everyone else's - web traffic goes through the same few services. It doesn't matter that each of those services is made from a thousand servers each - logically, they form a single unit, and the web has mostly a star topology. This leads to ridiculously stupid amounts of waste at the endpoints - if you and me are sitting in the same room and both want to watch the same funny cat video, we both download gigabytes off youtube, even though after you downloaded the video I should be perfectly able to stream it off your machine via LAN. We use CDNs these days, which are literally top-down dictatorship style attempt at forcing some minimum distribution into this centralized system.
The web is centralized. Your comparison with writing a story would be more accurate like this: it's like someone writing a story about "modern slavery" that's really about wage slavery. Yes, the social phenomenon of actual slavery has pretty much disappeared, but we've replaced it with something similar with similar issues, only one level of abstraction higher.
So out of the one sentence that I wrote you decided to ignore the part where I wrote that decentralization was referring to centralization of content? Another word for centralization is consolidation.
You might want to look up the term "walled garden":
I didn’t see the word “content” on first reading. I never have encountered Google or FB created content (other than open source code), and I also don’t use their news aggregators (or other services), so (with the exception of YouTube), I don’t think of them as being in the content game at all. Anyway, I’ve been happily ignoring their walled gardens for decades, and using the decentralized web for news, etc.
Certainly, they’re in the infrastructure + surveillance business, and (especially for Google) that’s concerning.
Also, “Decentralized” is a technical term. Google runs a large, decentralized infrastructure, based on web technologies.
“Consolidation” is usually used as a business term, and is orthogonal to centralizing operations. For instance, many companies have outsourced payroll to one centralized company. That does not mean their industries are consolidating.
When people intentionally use words wrong, it is bound to lead to confusion.
I believe the context of "The Decentralized Web" here is meant to contrast the increasing centralization of content from FB, Google, Medium, login walls pay-walls etc.