Also, perhaps if we learn to value servers, so not treat them as mere relays, perhaps we’ll be able to teach value and independence.
If you want to be independent, the only thing that matters is the ability to able to roam around and port our identity and data wherever we want. Where you are doing your computing doesn’t really matter.
government schemes to repurpose old computers into mini servers and that governments should give everyone a domain like NAME.TOWN.CITY and everyone can run a personal server and get used to it and then they can grow from there.
We don’t need any of that. Computing power and storage is so cheap nowadays that even people in middle-income areas can afford to collect piles of used smartphones on their desk drawers. If there was any type of economic demand for what you are saying, we would have seen by now some company trying to make a business out of it.
I did now, and I do agree that registrars could play some role in a more decentralized future, though I’m still unconvinced ActivityPub will end up being the protocol primarily used in that future.
Right, one can never be certain about the future, but AP is showing some staying power and (I think) the main reason that it’s not evolving faster is because we are not exploring possibilities beyond “let’s clone popular closed networks, and slap some AP to pass data around homogeneous servers”.
Computing power and storage is so cheap nowadays that even people in middle-income areas can afford to collect piles of used smartphones on their desk drawers.
I think that’s a dangerous assumption to make. Not everyone is as well off as ourselves. Some people can’t even afford a desk, let alone have a desk drawer full of old phones.
If you want to be independent, the only thing that matters is the ability to able to roam around and port our identity and data wherever we want. Where you are doing your computing doesn’t really matter.
We don’t need any of that. Computing power and storage is so cheap nowadays that even people in middle-income areas can afford to collect piles of used smartphones on their desk drawers. If there was any type of economic demand for what you are saying, we would have seen by now some company trying to make a business out of it.
Domain registrars do indeed make money off of this.
Did you read the next post on my series, by any chance? ;)
I did now, and I do agree that registrars could play some role in a more decentralized future, though I’m still unconvinced ActivityPub will end up being the protocol primarily used in that future.
BTW, you might be aware of this, but there is already a DNS-based authentication protocol (DANE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities) which is supported by various mail servers.
Right, one can never be certain about the future, but AP is showing some staying power and (I think) the main reason that it’s not evolving faster is because we are not exploring possibilities beyond “let’s clone popular closed networks, and slap some AP to pass data around homogeneous servers”.
I think that’s a dangerous assumption to make. Not everyone is as well off as ourselves. Some people can’t even afford a desk, let alone have a desk drawer full of old phones.
On average, we are rich enough to have plenty of gadgets around.
Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.