# 🍦What is decentralization

At its most basic level, it is a distinction between a centralised hub and spoke model and a distributed connected network.

Ensuring user choice — adapting to user preferences and giving users decision making power. It’s fundamentally about autonomy. Decentralised control looks like end-users having a choice between service providers and not being forced into accepting terms and conditions that exploit them due to a lack of alternatives.

Decentralised knowledge looks like users having local copies of their data, being able to export data or choose to store the authoritative copy of their data locally, It looks like users being able to have private conversations and share photos securely with end-to-end encryption where the content of communication cannot be accessed or deleted by external organisations. It can look like the company providing the service not knowing or storing the metadata of who contacts who and when.
