-------------------------------------------- Decentralization 2018.03.18 16:49:18 CET -------------------------------------------- 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.