110 lines
8.3 KiB
HTML
110 lines
8.3 KiB
HTML
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<title>Taking Back the Web</title>
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<h2>Taking Back the Web</h2>
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2021 June 25
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<a href="/blog">The exozyme blog</a>
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<h3>The web sucks</h3>
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First, the mandatory <a href="https://suckless.org/sucks/web/">suckless.org</a> quote:
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<i>"It has enabled the global information exchange, mass surveillance, studies in social control, allowed revolutions, made a fortune for many billionaires and in the meanwhile ruined our climate: the web."</i>
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The web sucks.
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It really does. Just think about it. Think about what a day in the life of an average web user looks like. You wake up, check your Gmail, or more accurately, Google checks your Gmail and reads all your emails. Then you hop on to one of the degenerate, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/Walled_garden_(technology)">walled-garden</a> social media or chat sites, and mindlessly give away all your data to be sold away. And don't forget the whole time, you are wasting hundreds of megabytes of bandwidth to load crappy JavaScript libraries whose sole purpose is to display pixels on a display in a way that will generate the most profit.
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<h3>The project</h3>
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Imagine living without Google. Without Microsoft. Without Discord. Without YouTube. Without GitHub.
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Impossible.
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Or is it?
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This world already exists. It's the one we are living in right now. There are worthy, decentralized, privacy-respecting alternatives available for each and every one of those services. The question is, how can we make the switch?
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That's what the exozyme project is. Is it feasible for ordinary people to use these alternatives? What are the barriers of entry? How can we tackle the suffocating <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect">network effect</a>?
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It's hard to say when the exozyme project really started. My interests in building a home server to supplement my aging laptop first began to turn into actual plans during November 2020. As the months went by, it slowly morphed into a more privacy and self-hosting focused project. I experimented with hosting simple servers on my laptop in the meantime and discovered <a href="https://cloud.exozy.me/">Nextcloud</a>, firmly cementing the project's direction towards self-hosting. Finally, on March 25 at 22:15:31, the project reached a milestone. According to server logs, exozyme was now live!
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I have a lot of good things to say about Nextcloud. Here's a quote from my personal blog about the wonderful app:
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<i>"Nextcloud is basically a huge hammer that tries to attack every nail. For most cases, a more specialized tool would be better, but Nextcloud can still give you a surprisingly functional solution to… file sharing, real-time collaborative document editing, photo management, chat, email client, contacts, calendar, music streaming, notes, tasks, forms, maps, Matrix client, and RSS client. So yeah, Nextcloud knocks down quite a few bowling pins with one gigantically overpowered bowling, or perhaps more accurately, wrecking ball. I anticipated a painful setup process for such a large monolith, but it went surprisingly smoothly. Perfect!"</i>
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So that knocks out Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Tasks, Google Forms, and more. Some people would call it bloated, but Nextcloud is awesome! Even better, it's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(information_technology)">federated</a>.
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Federation is going to be a word you're going to be hearing a lot, so let's examine it closely. The whole idea behind federation is that we want to combine the strengths of the client-server model with the decentralization of the peer-to-peer model. While we all know and love P2P networks such as the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190825115004/https://blogs.cornell.edu/info4220/2013/03/15/how-bittorrent-addresses-the-free-riding-problem/">fascinating BitTorrent protocol</a>, they aren't the best choice for many applications. Often times, we need a bit of centralization. Federation tries to address this by having small servers that communicate in a larger P2P network, maintaining some amount of decentralization. In the end, federation is really just a hybrid of client-server with P2P.
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So now that we have our powerful weapon of federation, we can start replacing most hated services with federated alternatives. Instead of Discord, try <a href="https://chat.exozy.me/">Matrix</a>, a decentralized protocol with strong encryption—it's basically email but for chat. It doesn't quite have a huge userbase yet, but it's much less degenerate than the idiocracy that is Discord, and it has some innovative ways of coping with the network effect that we'll see later. <a href="https://social.exozy.me/">Mastodon</a> is a vibrant federated alternative to Twitter with millions of users. <a href="https://tube.exozy.me/">PeerTube</a> is a new federated replacement for YouTube, although my server is currently flooded with Blender propoganda for some reason. Not that I dislike Blender—the complete opposite, actually—but it gets annoying after a while. There's also <a href="https://git.exozy.me/">Gitea</a>, a GitHub alternative that's not federated yet, but coming soon.
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Anyways, these alternatives do exist, and they work very well, too. Factor in the decentralization and privacy, and it's surprising that they aren't more popular and well-known. Why?
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<h3>The extent of the problem</h3>
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Why aren't we all using Nextcloud and Matrix and Mastodon and PeerTube and Gitea? Anyone with common sense can tell you: unfamiliarity, switching costs, the fact that everyone else uses the proprietary services instead... The list goes on and on.
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<h3>The future</h3>
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These problems are nearly impossible to solve.
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But only nearly. There are solutions. Look at what Matrix is doing with <a href="https://matrix.org/bridges/">bridges</a>. I need to have a Discord account in order to communicate with everyone else who uses it—the network effect strikes again! But with bridges, I can link my Matrix and Discord accounts together, in the process violating Discord's Terms of Service, but screw Discord. The important thing is that I'm no longer imprisoned by the network effect on Discord. Freedom!
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Or look at what <a href="https://activitypub.rocks/">ActivityPub</a> is doing. Follow your favorite PeerTube channels using Mastodon, or explore the entire <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse">Fedirverse!</a> Privacy-respecting, decentralized services have advantages that no proprietary service can beat.
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So what does the future look like? For a pessimist, not too bright. There's just too much that we need to improve. This is not going to be a fight that is easily won. But I hope the exozyme project can provide you with a bit of hope that we can do this. We can take back the web.
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