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I think it has to. If SciHub and Anna's Archive have taught us anything it's that it just takes one person to offer an invaluable service to millions. We're li

I think it has to. If SciHub and Anna's Archive have taught us anything it's that it just takes one person to offer an invaluable service to millions. We're living in an age of unprecedented control by corporate powers, but we're also living in an age where it's very difficult to stop a signal from leaking from somewhere. Corporations are currently building walled gardens and closing the doors behind them fast, but the scent of roses always wafts through the gates, and it really doesn't take much for a crafty fox to dig a tunnel.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
So, you've sort of nailed it. You need someone who is willing to coordinate, but you can rely on protocols and technologies that allow for frictionless dissemination of information to do the heavy lifting. In the event of socials, PeerTube and Mastodon come to mind. Archiving is harder, you need someone to babysit spinning drives and physical media somewhere safe, hence why the Internet Archive requires more centralization and coordination (and a bit of deep pockets to fund someplace safe to store the bits and atoms). In your example, Bittorrent and torrents for the datasets being shared. If "information wants to be free," it can be done, but someone still has to herd cats (whether that be people and/or code) to bring about the desired outcome. The piece to solve for is where the operations meets the legal entity, to ensure continuity and durability of the value provided. Again, look to the Internet Archive, Let's Encrypt, and Wikimedia to see how this is done. Certainly, it gets more challenging for an org like Anna's Archive that is in direct conflict with copyright law, but you can build and run high value, widely distributed systems without turning into Pied Piper. Corporations are always going to chase fiat, it is inevitable, avoid relying on them whenever possible if you don't want to be disappointed when they try to corner the market and extract whatever they can from what potentially has become highly valuable at scale to the user population. Twitter and Reddit are the most glaring examples, but there are many others.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

So, you've sort of nailed it. You need someone who is willing to coordinate, but you can rely on protocols and technologies that allow for frictionless dissemination of information to do the heavy lifting. In the event of socials, PeerTube and Mastodon come to mind. Archiving is harder, you need someone to babysit spinning drives and physical media somewhere safe, hence why the Internet Archive requires more centralization and coordination (and a bit of deep pockets to fund someplace safe to store the bits and atoms). In your example, Bittorrent and torrents for the datasets being shared. If "information wants to be free," it can be done, but someone still has to herd cats (whether that be people and/or code) to bring about the desired outcome. The piece to solve for is where the operations meets the legal entity, to ensure continuity and durability of the value provided. Again, look to the Internet Archive, Let's Encrypt, and Wikimedia to see how this is done. Certainly, it gets more challenging for an org like Anna's Archive that is in direct conflict with copyright law, but you can build and run high value, widely distributed systems without turning into Pied Piper. Corporations are always going to chase fiat, it is inevitable, avoid relying on them whenever possible if you don't want to be disappointed when they try to corner the market and extract whatever they can from what potentially has become highly valuable at scale to the user population. Twitter and Reddit are the most glaring examples, but there are many others.