I’m going to try and use this website as a way to keep track of various projects I’m interested in, and document my learnings about how to live on the internet with a minimum of reliance on large corporate entities.
The Pendulum Swings
When I started my career, PCs were just becoming popular. At the company I worked for, email was common, but split between Engineers and Office workers. The Office workers were heavily reliant on ‘the mainframe’ an IBM 3270 in the US for all their applications and email. The engineers used a network of VAX microcomputers, one local to us. As PCs became ubiquitous, email became a CC:Mail client running on on the desktop and wordprocessing was done using Wordperfect 5.2 with files stored on the users harddrive or the local Banyan server. As the network onnection to the US was not great in those days, it was very useful to be able to work independently of whether the server was reachable or not.
As the network has gotten more reliable, and local failures highlighted the frailty of hard drives, and the challenges of local backups, it was easier to rely on a central service once more, and webservers became the main place to get information from. It’s easy now to login to a common server or service, and share files in the cloud. Backing up your data became someone else’s problem. But now we’re reliant on that cloud, and if it’s not available, or stops working for any reason, we’re dead in the water.
In 2009 I created myself a facebook account. I used it to varying degrees over the next decade, and never thought too much about it until 2019 when some of Facebook’s business practices started coming under the spotlight. I started to think about how I was using it, but for the most part, I’d been fairly smart, minimizing data leakage. The benefits for me outweighed the privacy concerns…
My interest in finding an alternative became more urgent when I got locked out of my facebook account. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t able to challenge the decision, as the process is automated and relied on me getting a text message from a number I’d blocked, and by the time I’d realized it, it was too late. So, that was it for facebook, but it started me thinking about how I could get the same functionality and benefits that I got from facebook with other projects, preferably ones that supported the OpenSource ideals and were less reliant on central points of failure.
Topics for discussion
Decentralized messaging - Email, Spike Matrix, Jami, quiet
Decentralized publishing - Diaspora and the Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon )
Blockchain -