The case for the decentralization of online forums
Like many of you, I often get nerd-sniped into thinking about what it would take to create a perfect, frictionless medium for decentralized communication. All of the usual hits, like IPFS, paid posts via micro-transactions, etc. often make an appearance in these brainstorms.<p>But today, I took another tack: I started wondering what it would actually _be_ like if you had such a technology. Skip the &#x27;how&#x27;, and just imagine there was a way to open an edit-text field and send your message to &quot;the world&quot;, with no intervening centralized boogeyman waiting in the middle.<p>The thing that suddenly struck me is the question of how anybody would _find_ your message. Ok, you yeeted your thought out into cyberspace - who cares? Who&#x27;s going to read it?<p>I find that in my own habits, the question of who&#x27;s going to read my message has a LOT to do with how interested I am in sending it. I suddenly realized that this is the critical point. Something that Reddit has going for it is that using it has the subjective quality of going to a _place_ in the world - a fixed place that others can find. It&#x27;s not just that your content is discoverable per se, but rather that it _will be discovered_, because it is posted in a known, frequented place that will have other eyeballs. Like Martin Luther&#x27;s 95 Theses, _where_ you post most messages has a lot to do with how interesting they are. It&#x27;s accessibility, yes, but also the practical question of whether people will actually exercise their ability to access it. If Martin Luther had nailed his theses to a random tree in the forest with complex directions on how to go find it, it just wouldn&#x27;t have been the same. They would have been almost as easy to access (except perhaps for people who didn&#x27;t find it easy to navigate the forest), but the fact the church door was an inherently centralized high-traffic zone WAS what made it interesting.<p>Perhaps this sounds a bit trite, but I&#x27;ve started to realize that we crave centralized places to converse because conversing isn&#x27;t nearly as much fun without an audience. The Reddits and Twitters of the world are popular and interesting _because_ they are a centralization of our communications - a front door of the church we can pin things to. If you find yourself thinking this is very incomplete, give it a beat. For instance, like me, you might have some level of disdain for performative soap-box&#x27;ing on a platform like Twitter. You might object that &quot;sure, a lot of Reddit was crappy, affected karma-farming, but I just used it to discuss analog audio equipment and ask tech support questions about Rust!&quot;. But even niche interests, tech support, NSFW subreddits - the are all fundamentally relying on the same principles of knowing that you will have an audience. You might want different audiences at different times, of course, but most of the fun is related to how close you can get to the upper bound of who you wish could look at your content. Maybe you don&#x27;t really care that the whole WORLD can see your post, just that the entire world of ukulele enthusiasts can see it. But within that slice, the more the better. Also the more that you put those disparate audiences next to each together with a central nexus &#x2F; map, the bigger overall audience you can expect to have due to cross-pollination.<p>I bet that if you&#x27;re really honest with yourself about what your favorite places to discuss weird topics in the 90&#x27;s were, you&#x27;ll realize that even though it was some phpbb forum, there was some microcosm of centralization going on, if even just at the level of human affairs. If it was some esoteric hobby, then you were probably talking on the official forums of some organization that ran the biggest public events related to that hobby, or whatever. Whatever it was, there was _some_ germ of a winner of a popularity contest - some entity that had the visibility and recognition to centralize the discussion and make it a place where you might get some interesting eyes on your text.<p>I could be misunderstanding some of the fediverse, but it seems like there&#x27;s an explicit intention to create these autonomous sub-communities and remove any kind of centralizing authority. But really, that top layer generally IS the value, and is how you create a sense of Place. You can make the infrastructure as decentralized as you want, of course, but if the discussions themselves don&#x27;t feel like they&#x27;re happening on the church doors, you really don&#x27;t have anything a phpbb forum doesn&#x27;t have. You&#x27;ve basically just got people sending messages out into the void, which is about as fun and interesting as talking to a customer support chatbot. So, at _some_ resolution, none of this is interesting unless you&#x27;re giving people a way to post their content in THE place to discuss this topic. &quot;A&quot; place to discuss this topic is comparatively worthless.<p>Zooming way way out, I want to make a higher-level comment using an analogy. All of online experience is a lot like a party. There are many things that it&#x27;s good to have for a party: food, music, drinks, entertainment, shuttle service - lots of things. Yet we can all think back to parties that forewent some or all of these things and still gave us fond memories. There are a few things, however, that your party _has_ to have, like, definitionally: a place to be, and great people that show up. A party without these things isn&#x27;t a party. And if you organize all of the nice-to-haves, but skip the essentials, then you&#x27;ve just got something very sad... like a loud, well-catered, empty basement. Related - sometimes bigger parties are better, but at a certain point, things just end up crowded, and probably a lot of your favorite people have left anyway. Once somebody starts charging exorbitant rates at the door, things might be headed downhill.<p>The point of the analogy is that where we humans choose to gather online is a fluid and vexing thing. You&#x27;re going to find it impossible to write hard-and-fast laws about how your new discussion space should work because all that really matters is people are finding a way to have fun. This party-like quality, more than anything else, accounts for the ephemeral nature of all online platforms, and the natural herd migrations from myspaces to facebooks to instagrams to snapchats to tiktoks, etc. And sure, AFTER the fact, you can look back and give a technical analysis of why Facebook succeeded. You can also look back on your party and point to specific things that created a fun situation. But this never transmutes into some kind of formula for future success, and if you think you have one, you&#x27;re probably chasing last night&#x27;s party. Are we so sure that holding the party at Brad&#x27;s house is what made the party bad? Yeah, he started charging $5 a head, and a bunch of jerks showed up at the end. But I&#x27;m not so sure that means we should swear off house parties from now on. Like, I salute the open-mindedness of the guys trying to figure out a way to hold a party without a host... you know, as a thought experiment. But it would be cool if there was a place to hang out next Friday, too...