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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.