Rejecting platform trajectory
- Mircea Popescu, 2019
It doesn't take a genius to look online and see the state of the internet to know that this is generally true. Most platforms have fallen to enshittification, political correctness, and sterilization. This has led to a more closed off internet where ideas outside of the mainstream, any amount of controversy, as well as workarounds to the established rules will get you deplatformed.
It doesn't need to be this way. Platforms don't have to treat their users as cattle to be counted and rewarded based on output. You can reject platform trajectory.
What needs to be done? #
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Centralized networks #
I saw Telegram as the last "free" (as in speech and beer) centralized platform in the Western world. That was until they put most features behind a paywall11Telegram Premium was released in 2022 as a way to fund the app. To force users to subscribe, they put popular features behind the Premium paywall. and raised $330m in corporate bond sales.
This highlights the primary flaw of centralized networks: the ability for a single operator to control and exploit their users. Centralized platforms offer no guarantee of accountability, as it's been proven time and time again that no matter how bad a platform gets, people will stay because their friends are there22Discord is another example of a network exploiting and surveilling its users for profit and control..
Peer-to-peer networks #
Peer to peer is an interesting option that offers the best resiliance at the cost of stability. Since there is no agreement between peers to maintain a standard of quality, they have no reason or incentive to provide one. This makes them impractical for use with large-scale encrypted group messaging.
One example of this is Status, a peer to peer messaging super-app with a strong focus on cryptocurrency33Sadly, they went with a surveillance coin instead of something private like Monero. Booo!.
Federated networks #
I believe the solution to our problems was popularized in the 90's. No, it's not Email, but the idea of a user-facing federated networks.
Federated networks are sovereign, resistant to deplatforming, and potentially the best solution to the problem of censorship. Most44SimpleX Chat puts in a lot of effort towards the metadata problem, but no solution is perfect. federated networks have one critical flaw; excessive metadata sharing between untrusted servers.