#decentralization

[numbpill]

more stamps<3 enjoy!!

(ko-fi)

[the-starflower]

You should have your own website

As an Internet Veteran* and a web developer, I have a lot of strong opinions about the Internet and the direction it's going in.

Now I'm gonna allow myself a rant and hopefully convert at least one of you, and then I'll go back to obsessing over imaginary people. Ok? Ok. *I've been online in one way or other since the late 90s/early 2000s.

Yes, much of the Internet sucks now...

In the beginning, everyone had their own site. Fansites. Art portfolios. Online journals (the word "blog" wasn't invented yet). Lots of weird places you'd stumble upon by link-hopping from site to site.

But of course, as soon as the technology took off, the market noticed. Social media came along and made it easier to create an account on their sites than make something for yourself, so that's what everyone did. And here we are now.

Instead of a million little houses built by passionate individuals and all having streets and pathways linking to each other, we have these massive walled gardens of rented flats built by commercial interest. They're keeping their users like animals in a zoo where everything is an account and a subscription and an ALGORITHM (gods I hate algorithms almost as much as I hate AI) and monetized by taking our data* and using it to show us ever-increasing amounts of ads. *Collecting more data is all this age verification/chat control nonsense is about btw. I don't believe for a second they're actually interested in "protecting children" or anything of the sort.

...but there's still hope

Good news is, the personal non-monetized Internet is still out there. It's just been buried under a fuckton of ad-infested garbage and can be tricky to find.

There are still entire communities of people taking pride in making their own personal websites instead of relying solely on social media.

The main reason is of course because it's plain ol' fun, but another big point is to break out of the zoo. To take back some semblance of control over your digital life and contribute to an Internet that is still made by and for regular people, not for corporations. If we can make websites ourselves, we negate some of the power they hold over us. No need to get quite so devastated when Tumblr/AO3/Meta/etc yet again changes something for the worse if you always have your own site to fall back on.

As neat as it is to have everyone on social media, I wish more people would set aside the time to make their own sites.

We all live online, might as well have your own house. A house you can build however you want and can be taken down and moved somewhere else should the need arise.

"But but but my audience..?"

Yeah, sure, the zoos are useful for meeting people and getting your work seen. I'm here too, aren't I? I understand you want to be where most of the eyes are. What I'm getting at is: YOU SHOULD HAVE BOTH!

Use whatever to network and find your friends and fans - but don't put all your digital eggs in one corporate basket. Just like you sync your phone to the cloud and back up your hard drive (you are backing up your hard drive, right? Right?!) you should back up your creations and post them somewhere where you have control over them. Somewhere people can see your things without having to sign up for another bloody account.

While I realise I make webweaving sound like some activism thing, it really is a cool hobby.

I can't overstate how fun and rewarding it is to have your own place on the Internet! ❣️ Poking around with the layout and content and learning how it all works under the hood. ❣️ The thrill when you wrangle the browser into submission and get it to work exactly how you want it ❣️ Making friends and trading knowledge with other web-weavers ❣️ Not to mention the pride of showing the link to people like "yeah, I made this. And I made the website it is on too 😎"

It's beyond worth it for the skills you learn and the people you meet! At least think about it, please.

"But I can't code or design, how would I even make a website? It's too much work"

Can you take a prewritten text document and edit it? That's all you need to start. Can you edit your Tumblr theme? Shit, you're halfway there already.

Creating a simple personal site really doesn't have to be that complicated.

There are boatloads of free ready-made layouts and templates you can edit and free graphics so you don't have to start from scratch. Many websites don't even have graphics at all. There are also free content management systems that, once set up, allows you to edit most things without any coding at all. Installing, say, WordPress takes 5 minutes if even that.

Not to mention the myriad of very beginner-friendly tutorials and even real live people to ask.

Us personal web enthusiasts are THRILLED whenever someone new wants to join our ranks and most will fall over themselves trying to help. We're here for you. Hell, I'm here for you. My DMs are always open, don't hesitate to give me a shout if you wanna talk websites 🤝 (or previously mentioned imaginary people, I'm not fussy haha)

A few links to get you started:

32bit.cafe is a community of personal web enthusiasts and a great place to start. They have a massive list of resources and you can join the forum or discord if you want to chat with people.

Sadgrl has a lot of guides and resources too.

Pixel Shannon's guide to making your own website

Neocities is a free host and also has some community features

check out the web revival tag right here on Tumblr

More about the personal web movement:

Intro to the web revival by Melon

The IndieWeb community

Hello, world, I have a solution to the Internet problem

Visit MelonLand's Surf Club for loads of examples of personal websites

Now, go build your house. And then send me the link. I'm not joking, I really do want to see what you come up with!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

No such thing as selective censorship resistance

ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-17. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'll also be at the BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL on Sept 21.

If you have a sufficiently horrible boss, you might have heard them use the phrase, "One throat to choke," by which they mean, "We must arrange this project so there's one person I can blame and punish if it goes awry.

The problem with "one throat to choke" is that this is another word for chokepoint. If the person who has ultimate authority over the system somehow manages to evade your discipline, there's no one else you can approach to resolve any arguments about how the system should work. "One throat to choke" is a single point of failure. That can be a nice arrangement if you're in charge of that chokepoint, but if not, it means you're SOL.

The digital world is in the process of bifurcating. The dying, legacy systems are the zuckermuskian, centralized ones, where there's always one throat to choke. If you don't like the moderation, recommendation, or other policies on Google, Twitter, Facebook or Amazon, you know exactly who to blame. If you're a lawmaker or a regulator, you know exactly who to drag into court.

Then there's the new, exiting, free and open digital technology that's crawling out of the half-dead carcass of Big Tech: federated and decentralized systems like Mastodon (and the Fediverse) and Bluesky (and the Atmosphere). While both of these networks have official maintainers who oversee their open source software projects, and while both groups of maintainers also run the servers that dominate their networks, you can absolutely join and participate without the consent of the organizations that created and maintain them, and they can't stop you or kick you off.

That's what decentralization means – if you don't like a user or their behavior, there's no manager to speak to in order to have them removed. Sure, a user can be kicked off of some servers, even all the servers, but the user can still stand up their own server. So long as there are other users, somewhere on the internet, who want to interact with that person, they can continue to connect with one another.

Now, you'd think that the Maga movement would love this – and they do…to a point. Trump's Truth Social is just a Mastodon server, albeit one that very few other Mastodon servers have any connections to. But the Maga movement is incapable of imagining a world in which the power it arrogates to itself will ever fall into the hands of its enemies. They want the power to send troops into cities they don't like, to federally dictate election procedures, to fire any federal official without cause, to override Congress's budgetary edicts, to be insulated from all liability irrespective of criminality.

Maga desires these powers within the borders of the United States because it intends to abolish free and fair elections and install a dictatorship, which means they they won't have to worry about Democrats ever controlling the presidency and turning those weapons around.

But even if they manage this trick in the USA, they won't be able to pull it off on the internet. There are simply too many territories in which federated, decentralized services can domicile themselves, places that are not only outside America's jurisdiction, but where the local authorities are hostile to the idea of extraterritorial intrusions by the US state on their domestic affairs.

The American culture warriors, obsessed with the idea that tech platforms have shadow banned, downranked, deplatformed and demonetized them, want to bring Big Tech to heel. And since each Big Tech company has just one throat to choke, they think they can do it.

Take "age verification," the latest social contagion sweeping through authoritarian governments around the world. In the name of keeping kids from seeing stuff that's not kid-friendly online (a perfectly reasonable goal), governments are demanding that tech companies somehow deduce the ages of their users and block them from seeing adult materials. Some age verification proponents claim that it's possible to verify a user's age without creating as massive privacy catastrophe that reveals the browsing habits of every internet user, of every age. These people are wrong:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

The only way to verify that a user is a child is to verify the user, which means performing extraordinarily invasive checks on every internet user, and storing the results of those checks, and, inevitable, leaking the result of those checks.

The Big Tech companies are delighted by this. Google and Meta have both offered to do a kind of digital phrenology on their users to determine their ages. After all, they spy on us so much that they can probably make a good guess about our ages. And if they guess wrong, well, no biggie, they'll just block all the edge cases and force users to provide them with even more sensitive data.

But the future-proof, federated, decentralized services can't do age verification. Oh, sure, some of the servers in these federations can verify their users' age, and they might have to, because you can always find that single throat to choke for the people running the main Mastodon and Bluesky servers. But you can use Mastodon and Bluesky without using those servers – and they can't stop you.

This is something that the Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan discovered last spring, whe he ordered Bluesky to block information about his political rivals. All Bluesky can do in these cases is flag some messages as "banned in Turkiye" and then turn on the "block banned in Turkiye posts" filter for Turkish accounts. Those users can just turn that filter off, or avail themselves of a third-party client that doesn't auto-subscribe them to "block banned content" filters:

https://gizmodo.com/bluesky-just-bowed-to-censorship-demands-in-turkey-but-theres-a-loophole-2000593628

That's what it means for a service to be a protocol, not a platform. It means you can't demand to speak to the manager of the protocol if you don't like how someone is using it. It means there isn't a single throat to choke:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech

Today, the new, future-proof federated services are trying to figure out how to comply with age verification orders. Bluesky has announced that it will age verify UK users:

https://www.theverge.com/news/704468/bluesky-age-verification-uk-online-safety-act

But you don't have to interact with the Bluesky servers to use Bluesky. While Bluesky was (very) slow off the mark to enable the tooling that would allow anyone to talk to anyone else using Atproto (the underlying protocol) without Bluesky's permission, that day has arrived now. There are now Bluesky (the service) implementations that are entirely separated from the authority of Bluesky (the company), most notably Blacksky, created by and for Black social media users who lived through Musk's enshittification of Black Twitter and won't get fooled again:

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/27/techdirt-podcast-episode-428-blacksky-demonstrates-the-promise-of-open-social-media-protocols/

Meanwhile, Mastodon (the organization) has said that it doesn't have "the means" to comply with age verification rules in Mississippi:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/29/mastodon-says-it-doesnt-have-the-means-to-comply-with-age-verification-laws/

The Mastodon server operated by the Mastodon organization has a policy barring under-16s from getting an account there. But there are many, many Mastodon servers (including, you'll recall, Truth Social) and they are all technically capable of talking with one another. Even if Mastodon (the organization) implemented some kind of invasive age verification on its server, other organizations – so distant from Mississippi as to be beyond legal retribution – could sign up users of any age, at its discretion.

One wrinkle here is whether there is an "enforcement nexus" between one of these independent Mastodon or Bluesky servers and a government seeking to impose age verification or other censorship policies. If you're running one of these servers, you wanna be sure your throat is out of choking range of these governments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

The easiest way to do this is to not have any personnel or assets in territories controlled by governments seeking to impose censorship requirements. Large corporations whose investors made a bet on global domination find this tradeoff difficult to make. They want to open sales offices in every country.

But co-ops, individual tinkerers and small businesses typically don't have assets or personnel in a lot of countries or states, and avoiding the censorious ones doesn't pose much of a challenge.

The other enforcement nexus to worry about isn't enforcement against a server's operators, but rather, enforcement against its data. Territories with national firewalls (or heavily concentrated ISPs who represent a tractable number of chokeable throats) can block noncompliant servers from their users (who might or might not avail themselves of VPNs to evade thse blocks).

There aren't many national firewalls, and enumerating all the noncompliant servers in the Fediverse is a big chore for their operators (less so for all the noncompliant Atmostphere servers, because there's just not that many of those – yet). On the other hand, the mobile device duopoly of Google and Apple represent a pair of trivially chokeable throats that can be used to extinguish any app that displease a country's censors (all the more reason to make everything web-first and treat apps as unreliable adjuncts to core web functionality).

But there's one more potential chokepoint: to the extent that the Bluesky (the service) or Mastodon (the service) maintain some nexus of control over users, even users on independent servers, they could come under pressure to terminate users that displease governments. Now, Mastodon has no such control over users, and if it tried to exert that control (for example, by pressuring an independent server to terminate their users' access), they could be sued for tortious interference with contract.

Unfortunately, Bluesky has chosen to insulate itself from that hedge against being the chokeable throat that is used as a means to exerting pressure on independent servers in the Atmosphere. Bluesky's Terms of Service trap all of its users in a "binding arbitration" waiver that forces them to surrender their right to sue. That means that if Bluesky were to threaten Blacksky in a bid to force it to do age verification or engage in some other form of censorship, anyone involved with Blacksky who ever created a Bluesky account would be unable to use to courts to defend themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

(However, if you set up a Bluesky server without ever joining Bluesky (the service) and clicking through its ToS, you're golden.)

Of course, none of this matters to Maga – but it should. Decentralized systems with no readily chokeable throats are good for people with disfavored views, and that includes a lot of the Maga movement. Remember, Trump's agenda is incredibly unpopular:

https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Navigator-Topline-F04.07.25.pdf

Someday, Maga is going to find that their enemies have found the right throat to choke to silence them. But Maga's useful idiots just keep on stepping on this rake – these are the same self-owning fools who opposed municipal fiber and thus ensured that if just a handful of giant ISPs decided to deplatform you, you'd disappear from the internet:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

Bluesky users were furious when JD Vance joined the service. Maga culture warriors were furious when Bluesky users called for his account to be terminated. Both groups are nuts. If Bluesky lives up to its promise – if it becomes an unchokeable, future-proof, decentralized social media protocol, and not merely a platform, then there's no way to kick JD Vance off Bluesky (the service). All you can do is demand that Bluesky (the server) cut off his account, whereupon he will immediately decamp to another server where he is more welcome, and still able to communicate with any Bluesky user who wants to hear from him.

Progressives should want this, because it's far more likely that Bluesky will be pressured to terminate users for failing to be insufficiently demonstrative in their anguish over the Charlie Kirk shooting than it is that Bluesky will be pressured to terminate the Vice President of the USA. But Conservatives should want this too – because if they're really worried about "deplatforming" and "Big Tech censorship," then they should be trying to create a new internet where deplatforming and Big Tech censorship are impossible – not an internet where they decide who gets deplatformed and censored.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/16/too-many-throats-to-choke/#pluralism-is-resiliency

[amiibo-king]

(Sustainably) Overcoming Discord by mayfrogs

Aren't you tired of switching chat apps every 10 years? What if I told you there was a better way?

Just finished a new zine about how to get away from discord in a way that's actually sustainable, and not just another repeat of the same cycle like most of the alternatives people suggest.

Discord may have "walked back" their age verification, but they're still saying they fully plan to implement it at a later date, so this is still very relevant (and probably will be again the next time Discord does something shitty, and the next time, and the next time...) if nothing else though, that gives you time to share this with your friends!

[utopicwork]

PeerWeb - Decentralized Website Hosting

PeerWeb is a revolutionary way to host and share websites using WebTorrent technology. Instead of relying on centralized servers, websites a

Looks like the technique I talked about for hosting websites over torrents is already being used by some other people. Should mean it's viable.

[alcrego]

Digital walls, but walls

I encourage you to have a seat and read this little 'essay' I wrote back in 2014 if you really want to understand what I'm doing today. I would be really grateful and I'm sure you'll have a much better understanding of my whole work.

Digital walls, but walls

On the way to space and public art | came across the digital walls. They can be "painted" but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of separating...

A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts that have to do with the world of art and more specifically with urban art or public art. From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free from any premise or institution when it is created. (not considering the "warlike coexistence” with the advertising).

The appearance of the Internet has changed it. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, what questions that the street is the natural canvas of this art discipline. While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at it. Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no longer just plastic.

Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a tool, a method of creation or of dissemination. But at the same time, all these centuries of art history condition the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is.

The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world. Both virtual and augmented reality are also reality, but the fact that it is appreciated through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does not have its complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an intermediary. But at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today with these devices - movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and classic - and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.

At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of "existing" first in the ‘real reality’ to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have an impact on the analog reality.

It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art, since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity, always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by the "erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous" characters or the concept of "famonimity"; people or artists who are known precisely because they are anonymous.

Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder of the space divided by the private, the "leftovers" after the developers pass, the worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc., etc..... With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been. Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone, that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art would no longer have that sense.

Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone, free of charge and without any kind of condition, | believe that digital art fulfils this role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time. And so, the ’paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a company or simply, the property of an individual. Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is always subject to something superior that manages it.

Within this dilemma, augmented reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as the piece’s canvas. Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, | want to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit, to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to new artistic expressions that call into question deep rooted concepts such as museum, art and reality.

There are already many centuries researching, testing and creating the same type of art, whether sculpture, painting.... Except for the birth of new "isms" within these disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation... Thinking about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there are no previous references to support them.

But, at the end of the day, every new artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art. "Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.” The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because when we are born it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings, church, political powers...

This is why today (without underestimating the technique and the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the end, it was created by and for the power itself.

Then, this type of art collides with the urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who decide what is "art" are the people.

I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath.

Now we live in a new paradigm shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.

A. L. Crego, 2014.

[reportsofagrandfuture]