Decentralising gopherspace
--------------------------

Auzymoto is the latest SDF phlogger to migrate to their own 
server[1], to which I can only say "congratulations"! Auzymoto cites
a desire for control and certainty over the long term availability
of his content as motivations for the move, in addition to
apparently agreeing that the decentralisation of gopherspace is a
good thing in principle.

Certainly, decentralisation efforts seem to be picking up steam. I 
have been thinking a little, again, about what an ideal scenario
might look like for the phlogosphere at large.

At one extreme of a continuum, we have literally every single phlog 
contained on a single server. I don't think situation ever has
obtained in reality and I doubt it ever will. But the status quo
for many years has been pretty close to this, with SDF acting as a
kind of mega-node in the network. Certainly, we have been *much*
closer to this extreme than to the other extreme, which is
one-server-per-phlog.

I wonder about how desirable the opposite extreme is. This does seem 
to be the natural limit of the currently brewing sea-change, with
people like Tomasino and Auzymoto setting up servers just for their
own use. On the one hand, this approach obviously grants each
individual phlogger the absolute maximum amount of control, and
minimises the possible impact of server/network outages, which are
very good things.

On the other hand, I don't think that, coming from SDF, any of these 
people could deny that there is a certain magic associated with the
small communities that can form when several people make communal
use of a server. There is something to be said for it, even if it
doesn't scale endlessly. Of course, the one-server-per-phlog
approach also limits the accessibility of the phlogosphere to those
with the skills, time and inclination to run a server.

There seems to be a fairly strong parallel to the issue of Mastodon 
instance size here. In both cases, I suspect a "middle path" will
often work quite nicely. I think servers with, say, 10 or 25
active users phlogging on a common theme could be a really nice
model. It adds some structure to the network and solves the issue of 
content discovery to some degree, in that if you find an interesting
phlog you have automatically found a place where you can read stuff
on the same topic from other authors who, while not necessarily
endorsing everything the phlog you just read says, have at least
chosen to associate with the author. There would, of course, be
nothing stopping people who phlog on multiple subjects from having
phlogs at multiple servers like this, although *that* leads to
content discovery problems of a different kind, where you can't
automatically find everything that a single person has written
(unless they carefully interlink their phlogs).

We'll figure it out, I'm sure.

[1] gopher://auzymoto.net:70/0/glog/post0009gopher://auzymoto.net:70/0/glog/post