---
author:
    email: mail@petermolnar.net
    image: https://petermolnar.net/favicon.jpg
    name: Peter Molnar
    url: https://petermolnar.net
copies:
- http://web.archive.org/web/20190624130038/https://petermolnar.net/redecentralise/
lang: en
published: '2017-08-21T08:40:00+00:00'
tags:
- internet
title: Re-Decentralize

---

I had a long though of the whole re-decentralize the internet[^1] idea,
and I came to the conclusion many are approaching from the top, whereas
the problem, in reality, is underneath. It also applies to email, for
which's future I'm even more worried.

Facebook, Google, etc. are trying to swallow the internet. Have they
succeeded? Partially, maybe, truly never will.

In reality who's actively devouring everything is Amazon with AWS.
Remember the last AWS outage and how many sites were knocked off the
internet?[^2] It knocked off half of the internet, including cloud based
smart things at home. There's your real problem. Companies go for AWS,
because it's simple and cheap - both are lies, it's neither simple, nor
cheap, but it's impossible to convince the brainwashed. Apart from a few
exceptions and the paranoid, nobody dares to buy and own their hardware
these days, nobody hosts their own services, they just go for "the
cloud".

Take a look at email, because it's the future of the web: it's more or
less in the hands of 4 big provider. I don't know if the process can be
reversed, but I believe we need to start from the bottom up, by running
our own services, on our own, owned (or at lest rented) hardware, and
not from the top, by decentralising services.

Here's a reminder why keeping services out of centralisation so
important:

> \[...\] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved
> it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it
> revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message
> to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. \[...\] Email is
> neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email
> address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be
> delivered no matter who you are - whether the recipient is your oldest
> friend, your granddaughter, your boss's boss, or Beyoncé. The year the
> web was born, this flattening effect was astonishing. Anyone in an
> organization could communicate directly and immediately with anyone
> else, "regardless of rank" \[...\]
>
> \- Adrienne LaFrance[^3][^4]

*And we should all set up mesh networks within our cities to avoid the
tyranny of ISPs, but that is indeed and unfortunately, very hard.*

[^1]: <http://redecentralize.org/>

[^2]: <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/>

[^3]: <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/adrienne-lafrance/>

[^4]: <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-comes-after-email/422625/>