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> The web is already open and decentralized by its very design, and that openness and decentralization is a major reason for its incredible success. > It is the biggest, greediest grift in recent memory. Strong agree, all around. But I also have strong laments about trying to better distribute, decentralize the technical potential we've already built. There's a couple rare projects like https://yunohost.org doing the honest competent work of making this power accessible, of sharing it. But there's a super toxic mentality that computing isn't worth doing, a belief that real computing is not for users, that users are only interested in highly synthesized Service-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS) horseshit. I want to say that there's precious few real examples to empower & enable users, to really decentralize the power-base, to make accessible. If I look a little further, I can see endless fields of techies trying hard to make their projects usable, understandable. But so many projects exist in their own particular tech niches. Even if we are talking general software systems, there's still endless fractal mazes of Ansible or Chef or Terraform or Salt or Kubernetes, different worlds & paradigms to compute under, with various points of overlap & disjointedness. I cited Yunohost because it's one of the broader efforts to provide generalized mass configuration of systems, to make a lot of things accessible, in a friendly fashion from a central control panel. But it's still just a super cheap hack, a bunch of preconfigured scripts for a bunch of pieces of software, far from real systems mastery. Overcoming this our expectation that users fear & don't want real computing, that they must have baby-food, is not a real sustainable paradigm, in my personal view, and it cripples our ability to make real advances, real innovation: we need real operational paradigms to begin to have a power base upon which decentralization & distributedness can begin. For too long we've considered p2p & distributed to be app level concerns, things for the app. In my view, the cloud needs to come home, we need real bases of computing to start from, & a willingness to have systems that both have easy-to-get-started paths, but which also go deep & invite in real operational working & reworking. Computing is still closed. We need to re-embrace & make computing work. Web3 is not alone in not fighting the good fights. |