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Those who truly believe in a decentralized web should focus on creating routers with web servers in them that are easy enough to use that everyone can host thei

• cropcirclbureau 4y ago
  I don't know if hardware is the primary issue today. There are cheap computers on the market and you can even use old smartphones for a web server if it comes to it[0]. Not a lack of software either; even if recent, all the Fediverse services, Matrix and more are available and designed to run in a very decentralized fashion. (These being clones of centralized services. There are many past protocols and software that are more than capable.) I personally think it's just a matter of cultural practice. A large fraction of the world got on the web after the web as publishing platform was privatized. If it was the norm back in the 00s that every household, town and school first bought a box to function as the home server for it's members (which doesn't seem that far fetched imo. If Usenet and IRC were a little more accessible...), there's no reason that in this alternate history, most of the Facebook groups, Discord servers or Reddit subreddits would have had their own domain name or something like that. There will always be space for public soapboxes like Twitter and algorithmic feeds but that's only a fraction of how social networking is done. I like to think as the public consciousness is waking to the harms of monopolized publication platform that's always looking to grow it's stock value, we'll see the federated web return to the norm. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051