We live in a very interesting time, a time in which we have access to more information than ever and the ability to broadcast a message or information to more people than ever. This comes with a laundry list of pros but something that has always been confusing to me has been that the web is designed to be decentralized and fault tolerant but even by this design people flock to the same platforms in order to broadcast a message or information.
Websites like Twitter, Youtube and Facebook are now constantly being criticized by more and more people as being “full of censorship” and “injustice”. Whether or not these claims hold any merit isn’t really what I spend time thinking about but instead why don’t these people migrate platforms or create their own platform? For $5 you can have a VPS instance up and running with free software (free as in speech and free as in beer) within 10-15 minutes. Using RSS with this a person could setup a “feed” of sorts a lot like Twitter or Facebook but instead of having to worry about algorithms modifying what you are looking at as well as being experimented on in secret. A plain feed would come out of this that could be chronological in nature or otherwise as denoted by the user. The power in this case is given back to the people who run their own content producing websites that they can advertise directly to potential advertisers or accept donations on with something decentralized like Bitcoin and BOOM you are off to the races.
One could ponder something here like technical literacy making this a high barrier to entry but I remain optimistic that once people are tired of getting their rights stepped on by private companies, they will have no other choice. I remain optimistic in hopes that this decentralized communication model is utilized and taken in stride by the masses, until then I am stuck utilizing multiple platforms for multiple types of communication instead of just using my web server for everything. On the off chance that isn’t the most “first world problem”, I don’t know what is.