Imagine your friend is running their own social media website, a workalike of MySpace or Facebook, and you're an active user. This is a small community space wi

Imagine your friend is running their own social media website, a workalike of MySpace or Facebook, and you're an active user. This is a small community space with a few dozen or a few thousand users. Everyone is having a great time, the application is customized to your liking, and you have access to the operator, meaning if your account gets accidentally locked, you have someone to contact. Now, imagine your data on this community space is freely available for you to download and back up -- for the entire public data store of this social network, in a format which would allow you to spin up an exact clone of the existing space, including content, votes, threaded conversations, timestamps. Yes, even user accounts, because they are backed by PKI. This type of setup gives everyone involved an enormous amount of agency, consent, transparency-visibility -- something no one today comes even close to offering. Imagine if you could download a zip file of your entire Reddit account, the full threads of each discussion you've participated in, all your submissions, and start your own Reddit, and everyone already has an account on it. The benefits of this type of setup are too many to list in this one comment. It's a true revolution. Imagine your social network changing something without your consent, and you having the option to pack up and go! Not only that, but at any point you can re-validate or inspect everything that's happening, run your own data analysis on the social graph, do retroactive bot detection, etc.