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Decentralization | |
2018.03.18 16:49:18 CET | |
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I'm a supporter of decentralization. Not only because of the risks | |
associated with monopolies and monocultures, but primarily because I | |
enjoy the organic nature of do-it-yourself self-hosted content. | |
Social networks have made it very easy to reduce a member to a fixed | |
number of dimensions and interaction down to pre-conceived ideas | |
about what members want. This minimizes the learning curve when | |
joining, at the long-term cost of minimizing oneself. Decentralized | |
protocols offer an alternative by specifying *how* things are shared | |
instead of *what* things are shared. | |
Unfortunately, most users make decisions with short-term gains in | |
sight and migrate when frustrated later. This is my explanation for | |
the rise-climax-decline of successive social networks, with Facebook | |
now trying to delay kismet. | |
I've seen a number of recent phlog posts about decentralization of | |
Gopher servers and I'm all for it. One of my pet projects, which is | |
unfortunately halted at the moment, is a IPFS-based Gopher server. | |
All the mirroring is done automatically, anyone can spin up a server | |
and deliver the same content as everyone else. The server becomes | |
simply a gateway to the individual expression of members. | |
One thing I do wish we had in Gopherspace is RSS. This would make it | |
much easier to aggregate, follow and consume content by others, while | |
making decentralization even easier. | |
Just writing about these things get me excited again about working on | |
that project of mine. |