--------------------------------------------
 Decentralization
 2018.03.18 16:49:18 CET
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 I'm a supporter of decentralization. Not only because of the risks
 associated with monopolies and monocultures, but primarily because
 enjoy the organic nature of do-it-yourself self-hosted content.

 Social networks have made it very easy to reduce a member to a fix
 number of dimensions and interaction down to pre-conceived ideas
 about what members want. This minimizes the learning curve when
 joining, at the long-term cost of minimizing oneself. Decentralize
 protocols offer an alternative by specifying *how* things are shar
 instead of *what* things are shared.

 Unfortunately, most users make decisions with short-term gains in
 sight and migrate when frustrated later. This is my explanation fo
 the rise-climax-decline of successive social networks, with Facebo
 now trying to delay kismet.

 I've seen a number of recent phlog posts about decentralization of
 Gopher servers and I'm all for it. One of my pet projects, which i
 unfortunately halted at the moment, is a IPFS-based Gopher server.
 All the mirroring is done automatically, anyone can spin up a serv
 and deliver the same content as everyone else. The server becomes
 simply a gateway to the individual expression of members.

 One thing I do wish we had in Gopherspace is RSS. This would make 
 much easier to aggregate, follow and consume content by others, wh
 making decentralization even easier.

 Just writing about these things get me excited again about working
 that project of mine.