Avoiding the Centralized Web

So for the past year I've been trying to move more of my online presence into geminispace.

I wanted to talk about *why* I've been making this shift, what I think is appealing about gemini in particular, and just generally try to make a case for trying to withdraw more from the centralized web.

So first, I want to say there's both positive and negative aspects of this: gemini has its own merits and I feel like I'd do it an injustice to only describe it as an alternative to a bad thing rather than something actively good.

To that end, this post is going to start by outlining all the problems I have with the centralized web and why I think it needs to be avoided before I go onto talking about why I think gemini is interesting.

The centralized web, the commercial web, is the antithesis of everything I think the internet should be. I've been rather critical of social media in particular over the years

Retweets were a mistake

Spider webs and the extended body

but even places like Medium, Substack, hell even places like Webtoon that centrally house thousands of webcomics that used to be individually hosted are all complicit in creating a brittle, advertising based, exploitative model of the internet.

Many people have written before about the privacy problems of the modern web, including myself, and how these are platforms for surveillance capitalism but ultimately the point is rather simple: we are the raw material for an ads based system that needs to constantly be collecting more and more data to build profiles worth selling to companies trying to better target ads [or enable governments to target protesters and dissidents but that's another story]

A parable of a world slightly unlike our own

This fundamental reality has led to all the antisocial aspects of the web. It's why engagement with bad ideas just helps them spread, why the UI of the internet seems to be built around making us miserable, why misinformation can get a few million shares while the truth is still in drafts.

The modern web is a machine whose purpose is to keep us on it, engaged with it, feeding it.

Of course centralization would be the natural consequence of the trend

A billion people running their own webservers wouldn't make for good, efficient, data collection. No, the web centralized to ease collation and nothing more. And if you doubt how insidious this centralization can be please remember that when Google had problems with logins in late 2020 a significant portion of schoolchildren in the US couldn't even participate in their classes.

So, yes, the centralized web is bad for us for all of those reasons but *also* because of issues of autonomy. Let me explain a bit because this will sound like a digression but we first need to talk about free speech on the internet and what counts as silencing and censorship.

One of the debates you've probably seen many times is whether you should deplatform bigots and fascists off social media. The two main arguments you'll see are what I'll call "the free speech absolutist" and the "pragmatic antifascist" positions. If you'll please note that neither of those is intended as an insulting characterization for reasons that will become clear soon.

The free speech absolutist position is that preserving the right to say unpopular things is of the utmost practical and ethical importance, that if we start allowing for the suppression of speech then it won't be neonazis who get the brunt of it but people who are actually marginalized in some way, anyone's whose ideas are ahead of their time, or anyone actually challenging society in a way that pricks the conscience.

So the argument goes that if you start by making it acceptable to unilaterally punish people who say things we think are harmful, wrong, evil then that opens up the possibility of punishing all sorts of people---after all it was only a few years ago that it was a mainstream opinion that queers like me were actively undermining America itself by "promoting our lifestyle".

The other side you tend to see, what I'm calling the pragmatic anti-fascists, makes the case that extremely harmful ideology deliberately leads to people being harmed. This direct instigation of violence by people like the neonazis means that these groups cannot be allowed to use tools like social media to recruit and build up their followers. In this line of thought, hypotheticals about slippery slopes are small in comparison to the active harm of a fascist who can reach tens of millions of people in seconds.

Now, where I'm going with all this is that, well, I think on some level both of those arguments are true and that the reason for the tension between them is that our current situation---with private companies controlling access to speak to billions, with network effects piling power into the hands of a small number of people, and algorithmic curation amplifying controversy artificially---is just a very strange and unnatural position for us to be in. Someone like Joe Rogan has a platform completely unimaginable to any prophet, politician, or pontiff a generation ago.

I really do think we find ourselves in such a strange moral quandary because the world of communication has become so warped. The free speech absolutist and the pragmatic anti-fascist have the same fundamental fear, differently expressed: what happens when dangerous, bad faith, people get their hands on the power of these platforms?

So part of my argument for resolving this tension is that we must pull away from the ledge of that kind of unregulated power. I think we should move to decentralize our communications platforms, move to individual and community hosting as much as possible and away from systems of sharing that have these accumulation effects caused by centralization. No individual, company, or even government should have the ability to affect these systems that function as modern kingmakers.

Now, when I say individual and community hosting I want to explain more what I mean by that.

First, hosting your own content online has probably never been so simple and affordable thanks to both the rise of very cheap single-board computers and ubiquitous broadband.

If you have the know-how, you can have a stable webserver to meet all of your small internet needs for maybe $20 dollars.

Now, to be clear, I'm not actually claiming this is a feasible solution for everyone. That's where I think community hosting comes in. Community hosting is something we don't actually have a lot of and I want that to change. You can see it in the pubnixes and micropubnixes that are floating around the small internet, spaces where you can have your own web/gemini/gopher hosting. What I think we need, though, are more community datacenters: physical places for hosting. I see these as an extension of makerspaces, but rather than building things and leaving, like a lot of makerspaces---particularly publicly funded ones---seem to be run, I want there to be something like a community run pubnix: you gain access through your locality but then are allowed to interact with it remotely, as a space to build things and share your thoughts.

I think handling what is and isn't allowed in a community is going to be much easier than trying to make decisions at the level of millions and billions of people, allowing community members who have actual accountability to each other be in charge of figuring out what's appropriate.

Now, obviously, creating these spaces is going to be a challenge. It requires time, money, people willing to do the hard work of running them *and yet* I feel like it's far too easy to overestimate how much work it will be in that so often I think people end up not even trying in these kinds of spaces where it would be better to try and fail than do nothing.

I guess I'll let you know in year how my own experiments have worked.