How to decentralize the Internet

Introduction

Yarmo Mackenbach started today a series of posts about ELIUF, what is this all about can be read better at his blog post. But the basic idea is to explain what a decentralized Internet is to people that are not used to that concept, but rather to quite the opposite, a completely centralized Internet around Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, and how to omit TikTok

How is the centralized Interned

The Internet is centralized and what that means is that three of five companies will own the Internet, and that is not something that may happen, that is something already happening.

Let's see an example of how three companies share most of the Internet:

Jane Doe is a professional, she works as commercial manager at some food company. Here is how she uses the Internet.

• She has a Gmail address that she uses at the bank, and is the one she has used to sign up with all other services she uses on the Internet.
• She is looking for a new job, and relies on LinkedIn for that, of course her account there relies on her Gmail address.
• She read about her family and friends on Facebook, and she also follows News paper's account on Facebook in order to be up to date with the news.
• She uses WhatsApp (another Facebook company) to communicate with her friends and colleagues.

So, almost all her day over the Internet is with three companies.

• Microsoft
• Google
• Facebook

These companies know almost everything about her, where she has her Mortgage, their bank statement, here income, who are her friends and family and the phone numbers of those too.

But the worst part is not that, the worst part is that if any of those companies decides to shut down any of those services she might do nothing.

How a decentralized Internet should be

When talking about the Internet, Decentralized means to me that there is almost no authority over the people to uses the Internet.

To achieve that completely is almost impossible, at least for not tech people, including me.

How would you run your services with no root DNS servers?, with no providers of IP Addresses?, there should be certain form of ties, of authority in the Internet, just like in the real world.

So, at least one should try to do this:

• Own your domain: This is the most important thing
• Use an email at your domain: You can even host it at Google servers, but it should be at your domain
• Have a blog: or microblog or anything else but under your domain. There are a lot of options for the not tech savvy people, like: Wordpress.com, Write.as or even Blogger, just be sure they offer a way to download your data.

The fediverse

Now a better approach and one step forward is the Fediverse, but then you need some more knowledge, but you can start opening an account at some Mastodon instance, and use it instead of Facebook, and a Write.as account to blog there.