Recently it came to my knowledge that people don’t understand why a domain, a website, cryptocurrency, or p2p communication is so important. Why not just use Tumblr, Twitter, or whatever to share your ideas. Maybe have your bigger stuff on Medium or whatever? But the thing is that platforms do not deliver the same things that owning your stuff does. Owning the platform you use to share content brings many advantages on the fronts of freedom, privacy, and independence.

A platform is when you use something like Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Medium, or whatever to share your stuff and consume products. A property is when you own what you use to share your stuff, like when you have your domain, when you have your computer to run programs, or you have your local storage for your files.

Why does owning property matter? That sounds like some very schizophrenic kind of stuff, right? Well, the point of owning property is that in the end, YOU are the one who sets the rule. For instance, in real life, you could live in a hotel, or maybe rent an apartment for the rest of your life, but chances are you want to buy your own house. Why would you want to own your own house if you could just rent it? Apart from the financial consequences of owning a house, consider the independence and freedom that owning a house gives you.

Just like owning a house, when you own your domain, and maybe even your infrastructure, it gives you the freedom to share, structure, style, and post everything you want, however you want, without having to consider “terms of service”, “privacy policies”, “censorship” (if you consider private companies removing stuff from their private websites censorship, which honestly, I don’t). It’s just a very liberating thing to have.

It is very liberating, but if you’re not aware of how to do it it may seem like you could lose some of the ease of sharing, or maybe the network effect that comes with sharing your stuff on a platform. But alas, decentralized alternatives to platforms exist:

Alternatives to platforms

Twitter-like

If you need Twitter-like microblogging, consider Mastodon. It does have an awful name, but the software is cool. It’s a decentralized version of Twitter with all the cool interaction stuff that Twitter gives you. It can be self-hosted and you can reference stuff from other instances whenever you want. You may also just set up an instance for your whole community to share and discuss together in the comfort of your infrastructure, with all the niceties that using modern social media websites could bring. This way you don’t have to worry if your favorite super-villain bought the whole platform because he was bored or something, and is bringing toxic discourse back to you.

Discord-like

You’re using Discord to share stuff with groups of friends, a local community, or maybe with lots of people, you know only online. Well, apart from the fact that Discord doesn’t even have end-to-end encryption (which means they may read anything you send there), they may also choose who gets to use the platform, what kinds of communities are allowed and which aren’t, and even what bots are allowed, something you might know is frustrating if you’ve ever used something like the Groovy bot or maybe Rhythm. The most complete batteries-included alternative to Discord is Element. And honestly, it’s amazing, give it a try even if you don’t want to host your infrastructure.

YouTube-like

Admittedly this is the one that in my opinion is the hardest to completely replace, simply because YouTube has ANY community and content you may ever wish, and all the tools creators need to share stuff. If you wish to self-host something like YouTube for sharing content, there is always Peertube, which is somewhat like Mastodon but for video sharing, it’s pretty cool but will require quite a lot of infrastructure compared to the other options. Another option to consider is something like LBRY, or as it became recently known Odysee, which is a blockchain-based video sharing platform, meaning it is decentralized by nature but happens on a decentralized network which you don’t have to worry about.

Tumblr-like or whatever-like

Just don’t. I’m kidding. Somewhat. But really, make your website. I’ll probably write quite a lot about making your website in the future, but for now, I’ll redirect you to the hillarious landchad.net website. Check out that website even if you don’t want to set up a website, it has many more alternatives to centralized platforms and guides for setting those up too, which is pretty cool to get started.

Also, check out alwaysownyourplatform.com, which got a trending discussion on Hacker News today. The website has some news stories and things like that that show more of why you should own your platform.

Conclusion

If you share any of your ideas on the internet or you have any of your communities reliant on platforms, then you have to constantly live with the fear that the platform may make changes you don’t want or be managed by someone you don’t like, and that means having to abide by THEIR rules. Ultimately the best way to bring back the way the internet was supposed to be, an agora, is to utilize decentralized alternatives to platforms, that you can host yourself, or maybe use the infrastructure of other people from your community. This way you get freedom, tranquillity, privacy, safety, and everything else that comes with owning your stuff.

And as always, have a good one,

Doodles