We pay to use a lot of services. We pay with money, we pay with our attention, and we pay with our data. There is always a middleman taking a cut. We don't get on Instagram to check up on Mark Zuckerburg. We get on Instagram to look at cool pictures and engage with their creators and other fans. Is it possible to do this without the Zuck in the middle?

Yes. But it won't be easy.

What I'm imagining is a world where you own a server. Just one server. And think of this server like your phone, with many apps on it. There would be an app store, and the experience installing new apps would be familiar to every mom that installed Instagram. These apps are different though. This is where your phone and your computer will connect to for things like social media and finance. Rather than connecting to Zuck's servers, you connect to your own.

For this to work, your server needs to be very special. Instead of just storing your own data, your server will store pieces of everyone's data and will help share with everyone else. The cost of hosting your own server will go towards helping everyone else have a good experience. There is a level of good-will here that isn't main-stream in society. I don't think this is because people are selfish though. I think it's because people don't know it's possible.

Decentralization is an optimistic worldview.

Why would people do this? Why is it worth people self-hosting servers for a decentralized social media platform rather than centralized social media? I can honestly think of many reasons, and it seems like a no-brainer to me. But I meet many people that don't understand what's wrong with their current system. Let me start by saying it's the same reason someone might join a union for their job. It's the same reason we prefer democracy over autocracy. Why there are so many Thai restaraunts in your city now.

Decentralizatoin let's you control your data. Decentralization allows you to leave and join freely. Decentralization let's good ideas thrive and bad ideas die.

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Let's look at Netflix or Youtube. What would it look like in the self-hosted server world? Notice how many streaming services there are now. Netflix. YouTube. Hulu. Nebula. Prime Video, Disney+. Apple TV. Paramount+. Youtube TV. Peacock. HBO Max. Etc. Why are there so many? It's a terrible experience for the end user.

Imagine a decentralized streaming service. You download a server app that allows you to stream the videos as well as help host videos for others. Creators, instead of licensing their movies out to Netflix and the other streaming services, can upload their videos and set their price to watch. Groups of creators could band together to create subscription services as well. You might even get kickback for hosting! Your app would require other apps to be installed on your server as well, such as a connection to a blockchain of your choice for payments, for example. With some good engineering, though, it can be as familiar as apps on your phone.

Since this is decentralized, anyone can add their content. This means you might need help sorting through the sea of content. To solve this problem, you could subscribe to curators. These cura could be anyone, people that pick their favorites or collect a list of videos within a certain topic. You could follow people that give you DIY videos or French Cinema or Sports.

The point is that whatever the creators want can naturally evolve. And whatever the consumer wants can naturally evolve. If there is a feature missing on your current app, you can migrate to a newer version made by someone else. The apps can be "forked". But you can still choose whichever you like and maybe still have access to the same material. That's up to the market and the developers.

This can be applied to anything we currently have and creates possiblities of all sorts of things we haven't imagined. I get so excited about this stuff and I only want to share my excitement. This is an incomplete conversation about why I want a self-hosted revolution.

Why doesn't this exist yet? People are working on similar ideas. Urbit, for example. There are technical and social hurdles to overcome to make this successful, but in mind it is as obvious as the tradition from autocracy to democracy that has happened over the last few hundred years. If that could happen, this will happen.