My Digital Life

So, I've decided to make a personal website, and this is prompting me to think more about my approach to the internet in general.

The concerns driving these thoughts are varied, but I'll try to list them here:

I've had ideas around these, with some specific approaches to them, and want to share them here.

Personal Websites

Well, I'll start with the thing I'm doing now.

Creating a personal website is an excellent way to express yourself. You can put whatever interests you have into it, and share it with others. You can link to the sites of friends, to things you like, or anything else. It's a blank canvas waiting for you.

I'm going to use mine to write down my thoughts on things (would you look at what I'm doing right now), share news, show off images of my minecraft builds, and possibly upload music at some point. I would like it to provide the basis of my online persona, with everything I care about in one place.

On the topic of my persona, I'm leaving this website psuedo-anonymous. I want to be able to post about things that may potentially impact my professional career (some anarchist takes are too cool for the libs), and so will not be sharing who I am for the foreseeable future. I would suggest you do the same if you want to be involved in certain activism and praxis.

Decentralization

The personal site leads into the goals of decentralization and escaping power. A centralized web gives power to those in control of those few websites. The ability to censor and magnify ideas for their own purposes allows the maintenance of other kinds of power.

An important part of decentralizing is the spread of knowledge so people can run these smaller sites themselves. Skills in hosting, making websites, and any other technical skills and information should be given freely. Open source is our friend.

In general, enabling people to do a thing without you is good from an anarchist perspective. It remove power you would otherwise have over them, thus knowledge sharing should be the default in movements.

Discoverability

I mention this because it's an issue with personal websites that most of them will go mostly unvisited by anyone. As such we need to establish norms and systems to discover each other in these decentralized networks.

I think it's important to note that the current system isn't actually all that good at this either. In fact this is especially a problem in capitalism because people struggle to engage in streaming or youtubing or such just for a small audience. Time and energy are at a premium when you need to earn to survive, and it's just the reality that there isn't enough money in it for everyone. Some few are picked up by the algorithm, leaving many worthy people unnoticed. People are funneled into consuming the content of a few who know how to game the algorithms. Engaging in small communities is rare, when it should be common. People socializing at a scale where they can actually know most of the people around them seems to me much better for fostering community and allowing creativity.

So what are actual ways to create discoverability? Small websites have historically been listed on directories, and put themselves into rings linking each other. This creates some networks of related people. Sharing these websites with irl friends and people you meet online should also be part of it,

Messaging and Email

So the large email platforms are not very private. The basic email protocol is not end to end encrypted, so google can read all everything in your gmail if they choose to. You are at the mercy of these platforms, and they will turn over whatever is asked if law enforcement comes knocking.

Additionally, you can't setup your own email server and talk to someone using one of these services. They block mail from any server that isn't well established. Thus the typical email ecosystem is very centralized, and insecure.

What do we do? I don't have it figured out completely, but I've been thinking that we could start a network of email servers. All setup to be end to end encrypted. You would setup your mailbox on the server of someone you personally trust (or be that someone for your friends). Then you and your friends have secure and private messaging among yourselves.

If you want to email someone on another server you'd have your server admin and their admin get in contact and whitelist each other. Every server connection would rely on trust which can be revoked if someone is shown to be a bad actor. Server admins commit to maintaining the server and it's white list

This is highly decentralized, and can run into issues if you do want to email someone out of network but trust can't be established. Maybe there are better ways this can be done. I'm just floating the idea.

Similar things could also be done with some decentralized instant messaging protocol. Maybe the matrix protocol could do this? Idk.

RSS Feeds

Gee, wouldn't it be nice if you could see when someone you knew posted something on their site without having to check it every day? Say hello to RSS feeds! It's a standardized way for a site to list whatever updates for an automatic system to check. You then can check your RSS reader and get notified whenever whatever site you're interested in updates. I'm currently using FreshRSS as both my aggregator and reader, although I'm probably going to try some other readers. Will report back on what I like.