The Centralized Internet Is Inevitable
I&#x27;m finding it rather unlikely that decentralized institutions like blogs, forums (the PHPbb kind, not subreddits), personal websites will disappear as a class. What has been happening is that people have taken the parts of their communication that does not require such tools into the more convenient walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit -- commercial entities that (for perfectly valid commercial reasons) focus on the 80% of communications that they can service with 20% of the work. If these behemoths were really trying to become universal content archives, they&#x27;d behave very differently. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re losing any sleep over the existence of 4chan, Dreamwidth or Simple Machines Forum; it&#x27;s a different world, and not one they could easily make any money in. They have centralized the internet to the extent that helps making them money and no step further.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if states start playing this game, but if government IT so far has been any indication, the results won&#x27;t last long. Most likely, servers in rogue countries will be used for all sufficiently hot potatoes (just as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are operating from Russia but used all over the world), whereas the rest of online activity that doesn&#x27;t fit well into the big walled gardens will keep happening semi-anonymously as it is now. Governments will probably keep downloading and hoarding everything, but this has been going on for years and everyone just adapted. Downloading is but a first step on the long road to controlling (and, unlike the former, the latter cannot easily be automated). Encryption bans will be undermined in practice by steganography, surveillance by fake data, and censorship by various forms of illegibilization. I&#x27;m not saying it will be a great world to live in...