#decentralization

Our systems do not need to be high-maintenance, intensive on resources and energy needs. They don’t have to answer every request with availability and latency that measures up to however many nines or zeroes are the current industry standard. They have to attend to the needs of those who are using them, which can be much less demanding. We can run both infrastructure and software at more human scales and learn other ways of growing or shrinking, and we can also scale to high performance and availability too. This is what the concept of a network enables after all, but it is often used to centralize and create dependency instead.

From hosting email and simple HTML websites in my youth to the current attempts at decentralized Twitter- or YouTube-like platforms, the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never will—because the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience. The primary “feature” of self-hosting is, for most, a fatal flaw: it’s a chore. It’s akin to being “free” to change the oil in your car—it’s an option, but not a welcome one for most.

"As the computing world becomes more and more decentralised, people are realising more and more ways to free themselves from a single PC, work socially, and live a life online."