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Discussion on: Project Benatar: Fending Off Data Black Holes

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Wayne Werner

Though probably more like SO blogs or something, since SO is for questions and answers, rather than discussion. This platform (like Medium) is definitely more for discussion.

I do love the premise here, though. It's actually one of the reasons that I've started to try and excise myself from the gravity well of many of these huge systems.

If you look at when the web was young, and Google embraced and supported things like RSS and other open protocols. They've tried many times to kill off and destroy those parts of the open web, to say nothing of Facebook (and how incredibly ironic is it that they've introduced their own cryptocurrency? The only more bizarre organization I could think of issuing crypto would be the US treasury).

I've been working to get back to open protocols like email and RSS/Atom, among others. Storing, rather than streaming.

The other thing about these massive bodies is that they have a commercial necessity to bring you back in, so notifications become a huge part of people's lives. I noticed that I was living in a notification-heavy world, so I started dismantling my notifications, keeping them only for the actually important things.

My life feels a lot more calm, and I've created content more often, by quite a bit.

I do like the idea of federation, like Secure Scuttlebutt, or Mastodon, but so far what I've seen about federation is that there's still some lack of control, as well as in some cases a lack of... I don't know what you'd call it, but basically - we have multiple devices usually, and we need better tools to be able to bring our content(s) with us. Without necessarily having to depend on a commercial service, aside from the availability of TCP/IP, or the Internet.

I don't have those answers yet, though :P