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S3 is owned and operated by a single entity (Amazon), with all data stored on and served by that single entity's servers - i.e. it's centralized.

Nowadays there are other companies offering S3-compatible file storage, so at best "S3-compatible" would be federated, but compared to something like IPFS that's much closer to the "centralized" end of the spectrum than to the "decentralized" end.

That is: decentralization is a separate concern from geographic distribution; the former pertains to control/ownership over the data and the hardware storing it, and in S3's case that control/ownership is centralized into a single corporation.



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