given the choice between facebook or dysphoria, github or git, netflix or bittorrent, twitter or rss, the fed or bitcoin, I would much prefer the &quot;web-ring&quot; be decentralized.  The thing is, in each example I gave, I would say the proprietary singular institution always works out better because the decentralized example is too complicated for the average joe to invest the time to learn.<p>instead of a central web-ring, what we really need is this standardized meta-layer language over html.  a way for people to &quot;write on&quot; a web page, and have it written back to the web server.  a protocol that all web browsers speak, and all web servers accept.  it could even be more irc like and less reddit like, a live chat that exists between all the people with the page open.  it could be both.  let clients choose their own way to make sense of the metadata, different browsers can have different comment viewing interfaces and sorting algorithms.  i see w3c mentioned, but i havent looked into how it is stored.  can a webhost censor comments. is a blockchain between participating servers better, so the data is immutable?<p>then people can make competing centralized repositories or the pages&#x2F;servers can communicate with dht&#x2F;blockchains and create their own decentralized mesh.