You need to own your online identity.
- Escape walled gardens
- Connect with others directly, without a meddling middleman
- Control what you want to see and engage with
The figure below is from a seminal work on computer networks written by
Paul Baran.
Here, you can view each point as someone's computer.
- In a centralized network, the central institution/computer has a lot of power. It can censor, manipulate, etc. If it goes down, the entire network is dead. This is the situation for e.g. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok.
- In a decentralized network, the situation is slightly better, by having divided the power over a few central institutions/computers instead of just one. However, each local central institution/computer still has a lot of power over the computers connected to it. In this figure, there is still a central institution/computer without which much of the network falls apart.
- The internet is meant to be distributed instead. In a distributed network, everyone can choose by themselves who they talk and listen to.
The ideal situation is to have a fully distributed network. We recommend choosing as often as possible for options that contribute to a distributed network without centralized control.