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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.
.
