Aral Balkan
I’ll probably run out of air before folks get this but, hey, one more time for those in the back:
If you’re creating “alternatives to #BigTech” that scale vertically, you’re doing it wrong. You’ll never beat Big Tech at vertical scale. They invented the game. They’ll destroy you at it every time. And say you somehow do manage it… congratulations, you’ve just become *checks notes* Big Tech. *golf claps*
So what do you do?
You limit vertical scale and #design for horizontal scale.
Aral Balkan
@ainmosni But what if it didn’t take technical knowledge to setup or maintain your own place?
I see what you’re proposing as (likely very valuable) stopgaps. But stopgaps that are dependent on the benevolence of their own small gods. The small gods might be kinder than the big gods (or not) but they‘re gods nevertheless. If we’re to look beyond stopgaps, I feel we need to design systems without gods. No matter their girth or character.
Daniël Franke 🏳️🌈
@aral @KarlHeinzHasliP Yeah I know what you mean, but I'm coming from a bit of a different angle. Not everyone can do all the tech stuff, just like not everyone can do any skilled profession. So, instead of every user trying to self host their tech stuff, the more technically inclined can do the tech stuff for their community, while other members take care of other needs. This is how you create small self sufficient communities where people take care of each other via mutual aid.
Aral Balkan
@ainmosni What makes up small communities? Individuals. How do you model a small community in which individuals retain their sovereignty without modelling individuals with sovereignty first? The reason I start at modelling the individual is because I don’t know how else to design a digital and networked system in which people exist as as people (in other words, with mathematically-inalienable rights that protect the integrity of their personhood).
Daniël Franke 🏳️🌈
@aral @KarlHeinzHasliP It is, but from what I've seen, your focus is on individuals, while I want to do a more small community focus.
Not that I dislike your work, far from it. :)
Aral Balkan
@ainmosni Please do, I look forward to reading it. #SmallTech is basically anarchist tech.
Daniël Franke 🏳️🌈
@KarlHeinzHasliP @aral I've actually been thinking about an anarchist model for tech, based on small communities and mutual aid, considering writing a blog post about it soonish.
Karl Heinz Häsliprinz
@aral Instances of a municipality seem appropriate. Instances of one require grandmas, disabled folx and kids to host their own, so in oder to not exclude them... Municipal services should include instance hosting.
Aral Balkan
What does it mean to design for horizontal scale?
It means limiting the growth of individual instances of a service (e.g., number of accounts, etc.) and investing in ensuring that as many different people and organisations can run their own and that they can all talk to one another and interoperate.
It means keeping the power relationships between instances as level as possible.
Take it to its logical conclusion and you get the #SmallWeb: instances of one.
heapwolf
@aral servers are and always will be landlord-tenant oriented, this is antithetical to a free and open internet. I don’t object to commercial ventures but the fundamental stack must be absolutely free and open. No black boxes. No gate keeping. No rent extraction.
We designed a packet relay algorithm that was originally intended for partition tolerance, however its design also makes it suitable for *significant* partitions (hundreds of hours at the moment)
Aral Balkan
@heapwolf All of those can be solved in various ways. Currently, with pre-alpha code and zero investment, you can set up a small web site that is maintenance free in under a minute with zero technical knowledge for less than €10/month. All of those numbers can be improved in the future with investment from the commons but anything beyond that is premature optimisation at the moment.
Regarding sockets (congrats on shipping, btw): how do you handle offline messages if not without always on nodes?
heapwolf
@aral The number of people who have the money, time, and expertise to run servers prohibits this from ever reaching critical mass. Check out what’s happening recently in P2P, we just shipped https://sockets.sh, that’s step one. This month we’re open sourcing the P2P libraries that make it possible for users to communicate without servers, even if people are offline. No servers == no landlords.
heapwolf
@aral also, I think it’s nice to help people set up servers and run websites, but it will always be limited in what people can build. Because cloud costs always scale up with demand.
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