#centralized internet

So I am constantly in active rebellion of the centralized web. We're in a world where all of our online interactions happen on just a handful of sites (and this includes DIscord and Tumblr too).

SO I WANT TO REMIND FOLKS -- YOU CAN BUILD YOUR OWN STUFF, AND WHEN YOUR FRIENDS DO IT YOU SHOULD USE IT.

Now I know not everyone can pay for their own webhosting and setup their own stuff, but for those of us who can -- we should. When every major platform is at risk, we should be splintering out across the web and decentralizing as much as we can.

I host the Nerd & Tie [dot] Social forums for my friends and my stuff for instance.

It's a "slow forum" right now, but it can support a lot more -- and works well on mobile. But, like, on a lot of webhosts setting up a Flarum forum like that takes almost zero technical skill.

And you can set up your own blog on a self hosted server. Like Wordpress is incredibly easy to set up on your own site, We run the main Nerd & Tie site -- and we use it to serve up our podcasts. I also use it to power my webcomics like Peregrine Lake.

My personal website comes from the old internet, so my blog is literally run from a hand coded piece of software I hacked together originally back in like 2001.

And you might be asking yourself "How do I follow blogs that are independently run" and the answer is simple -- RSS feeds.

RSS is an XML format that breaks down items in a standard way that can be interpreted by an RSS reader. You probably already use something that touches RSS feeds -- Podcasts run entirely on RSS feeds. I don't know if it still works, but even Tumblr blogs have RSS feeds at the url [username].tumblr.com/rss.

Now I use Thunderbird for email, which has a built in RSS reader to monitor certain blogs to watch for import updates.

Is it harder to discover people to follow in this model? Absolutely. The onus is on the reader to seek out the folks they want to read and interact with. But it's safer. We see with congress's attempts to constantly ban TikTok and Musk's destruction of Twitter that centralized platforms have deep vulnerabilities. By moving across the web to multiple datacenters on multiple hosts we ensure that we're much harder to get rid of.

Watching what you say

You maintain your friendships here

While you are far away

We prune back your social life

Wilting back your way

You know only the truth that is near

Unite the world

In chains

We shall give them information

Freely grant facts

Through us

We shall bind and shape the world

With informational control

Granting freedom that’s illusion

Marco Arment wrote about the death of Google Reader and he seems to find an underlying theme:

"Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.5 While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance."

Arment's moral is that the web is common property: "Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership.". This seems to be in line with what Ven Portman wrote about how we rely on centralized internet too much:

So we have this generation of people who think using the Internet is typing into a box and pushing the send button on one of these centralized services.

Portman brings up our lack of understanding of how the internet and computers work, and ask the question - how are we going to make an encrypted internet, that will shield us from NSA and everything else? Admittedly, Portman sounds crazy and very angry, but I liked some of his ideas - other than the quote above, he also said "Perhaps at the Starbucks of the future you’ll get a free coffee if you look at an advertisement for 30 seconds." I find this conundrum of free everything - but only because advertisers expect people, who are used to get service for free, pay for something they advertise. (I wrote about it here.)

And now that we talk about advertisements: "Facebook news feed ads generate 49 times more clicks at 45% less cost" I find this incredible, but actually a great trend: Facebook news feed ads work because they are more personalized than other ads - and, well, because it's harder to notice that it's an ad. If you think about it, the new Tumblr ads follow the same formula - you can hardly notice that they are ads:

At the same time, I did not click through any Tumblr ads so far - simply, because they were not personalized for me. I think when Yahoo works out a better algorithm that takes into consideration the content you usually follow/like, it can be close to what Facebook is doing.