💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › decentralising-gopherspace.tx… captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:50:26.
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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