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I love decentralization: the freedom for individuals to establish a presence in a society, online or in the real world, on equal terms with everyone else, and to not be beholden to large corporations or government entities to provide a place and a space for them. It's one of the things I loved about the early days of the Internet, and it's one of the things I currently love about Gemini so much. To that end, I always want to encourage the adoption of decentralized tools as much as I can, from Mastodon to PeerTube to Tox, and even self-hosting on Gemini.
Today's Internet, however, is built almost from the ground up in a heavily-centralized paradigm. Almost all of the content on the Internet is hosted on just a few services: YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Wordpress, and so on. Smartphones are carefully designed to remove compute power from the user and give it to the corporations that sponsor their app stores. Even many home service providers don't allow self-hosting of any kind, blocking users by locking down router settings or punishing them with data caps and throttling.
The biggest problem with reversing this trend is that most people don't care about it. They say they're worried about privacy invasions and aren't comfortable with government surveillance, but they don't take any active steps to mitigate it. Why? I think there are primarily two factors at play.
One is the convenience of centralization: any content you could ever want to find is on YouTube, Amazon, Google, Reddit, and all the rest. One no longer has to keep a lost of bookmarks, as was so common twenty years ago; one of my friends recently commented that he hasn't used bookmarks outside of a work context in over a decade. Now, simply go to one page, type in what you want, and voilà! Everything is one click or tap away.
The second is a lack of perceived downsides for buying into centralized services--and, conversely, the danger of going one's own way. The mass tracking has no tangible negative impact on their lives; in fact, many find targeted ads to be convenient, as they don't have to search so hard for something to buy. On the other hand, we hear endlessly about how hackers are trying to steal data from us, and how dangerous it is to remove "security checks", which are often really permission blockers, from smartphones and PCs.
In fairness, some security know-how is required to self-host Internet services safely. Most people don't understand what it takes, and most people don't care. But that apathy is a killer to decentralized projects in the long run.
Many of my idle thoughts are focused on Gemini these days, so my first instinct is to ask how we could use Gemini hosting to encourage decentralization.
One possibility I've considered recently is to use file synchronization services. I use Syncthing heavily, and I consider it one of the most important and useful applications I have. What if one were to install Syncthing on one's computer and create a Gemini directory, then run a script that used Syncthing's REST API to set the directory to send-only and automatically accept incoming peers?
The problem with an approach like this is that it would require so many additions and extensions to a Gemini client that it would essentially no longer be running the Gemini protocol. Certainly a viable decentralized network could be built this way, but other tools already operate under this paradigm far more effectively, and they don't use Gemini either.
One could achieve a type of interim solution by building server software that serves content from connected Syncthing directories. This server software could then be distributed freely so that many people can offer their own hosting to Syncthing users. This would be a federated approach similar to the Fediverse: individual users don't run their own Gemini capsules, but they host their data on a service that does. Many tildeverses already do this kind of thing, but a distributed backend like Syncthing could free users from having to rely on the server's Web interface and allow the server to update user content asynchronously.
I'm thinking of building out a site like this as a proof of concept. However, I have so many other potential Gemini projects in the pipeline that I don't know when I would get around to it.
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[Last updated: 2022-12-25]