💾 Archived View for skylarhill.me › posts › decentralized-internet.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:00:56. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Let's imagine a hypothetical decentralized internet for a second.
Your home internet connection is fast, and it's fast for both uploads and downloads. You're not much of a sysadmin, but like everyone else, you know someone who is, and maybe even live with them. They run some services on a laptop in their house (or in yours, if you live together).
You decide you want to talk to your friend who lives a few hundred miles away. Instead of logging into Discord, you log into the XMPP server your sysadmin buddy runs for you. It connects to the XMPP server your friend runs in their house, and y'all have a nice chat.
Your friend sends a meme, and you want to share it with your wider community. So, you log into your favorite mastodon instance, run specifically for other ttrpg enthusiasts in your region (you play in the admin's Strahd campaign!), and post it. It gets distributed across the whole network, and your friend in Australia comments a pretty sad attempt at a witty reply. You laugh anyway.
You settle in to watch some anime. The latest season of "I Can't Believe My Girlfriend Is Allergic To Her Own Hair" just released, and you've already torrented it onto that laptop your buddy runs for you. You connect it to your TV through Jellyfin and start streaming it. It's pretty great! You decide you're gonna review the first episode on your blog, so you pull up Lagrange and upload the review to your capsule with Titan. (Your buddy also runs a Gemini-exposed pubnix that you're part of. You've been meaning to really dig into the Linux terminal, but you're really not comfortable with it yet.)
At no point have you had to trust your data to any corporation. You know and trust the admins whose services you use. Things are pretty nice.