There was once a dream of a decentralised web.
As recently as a decade ago we had a still very active blogosphere, connected via blogrolls and RSS. Specialised web forums were still mainstream and messenger apps could largely interoperate.
Centralised social media slowly ate that dream. It had plenty of positives, but it pulled more and more people away from the open web and into corporate walled gardens.
Some people kept the dream of decentralisation alive. And now you are here.
@tomw Back in the day, we owned our own data and maintained it on our own servers. Now, that data is hosted on a Mastodon instance. We can export our own data to preserve it. But does this preserve the conversations?
If we want to braise the sea level, and get the mainstream decentralized, how do we make this easy enough for general adoption while remaining sustainable and decentralized?
Seems we need to make the mental overhead required to own and operate trivial.
I've thought for a while now that every house should have a home server. A social media host, an IOT app hub, schedule, whiteboard, timeline, all of the stuff we give over to Google and Facebook... It's weird to me that a desktop could handle all that but we don't use them like that, and instead we give all that info to other people's database.
Tom Walker
Evan Light
Nate