title: Decentralization through federation is the true answer to the censorship problem
author: 寮
date: 2022-10-29
tags: technology,privacy,anonymity,internet,webdev
threadid: AP1z0LVF9zi6Sdptsu
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Censorship, mass surveillance, discrimination, criminality, scams, centralization, power grab, advertisements and trackers, propaganda.\
No matter your beliefs, at least 1 of these words describes what you hate most about the current state of the clearnet, so basically literally everyone who uses the internet agrees to some degree that the internet is broken.\
Little do they realize that it's up to us to fix it before those who have destroyed the internet in the first place come in as "the solution", which will break the internet even more.\
What they don't seem to realize at all is that we already have all the tools needed to fix the problems.

And so everybody is working on a solution!\
Except, they're no solutions.\
Every single solution so far aims at fixing their problems while at the same time creating even more problems.\
Just for some simple examples:

Left wing commies have a problem with ads, trackers, and discrimination, so they set up websites with no ads and trackers, but are incredibly discriminatory towards certain groups of people and businesses in general.\
What they ultimately want is a walled down echo chamber for themselves and their 2 or so friends, where each person has 200 different sockpuppet accounts each just agreeing with each other all the time.\
Meanwhile, they have absolutely no problems with censorship and propaganda at all, some might have a problem with mass surveillance and some might not.

Right wing boomers on the other hand have a problem with censorship, propaganda, criminality, centralization, and power grabs, but have no problem with mass surveillance, and ads and trackers at all.\
So they create far too bloated, buggy, centralized platforms claiming to be against censorship, propaganda, criminality, and centralization.\
Then they go ahead and censor everything that's not in line with the admin's beliefs system, which therefore counts as propaganda, and if they start as a decentralized service, they end up disabling federation altogether once they get big enough.\
And as soon as investor money starts flocking in, all of the sudden they turn soycialist, start censoring everything they claimed to be standing for just to continue to receive the free money, and basically become the neolefties, and the boomers keep falling for the meme they've become.

There is however a solution, or well, it solves the centralization problem, but with that you'll instantly solve all the other problems as well.\
And that's the darknet.

Why darknet?\
Because the clearnet is just dead, it's long beyond repair.\
95% of the clearnet runs through one of the big tech providers, whether it be Goolag or GoDaddy domains, Cuckflare CDN, Amazon AWS, and what not.\
Even if you use other providers or become your own provider, you'll still need to deal with SSL certificates which are defacto mandatory now and the CA can kick you off (simple solution: get a certificate somewhere else), DNS providers who can kick you off, VPS providers who can kick you off (looking at you, LINODE!!), NIC services which are only a handful of them and all controlled by the same entity in the end (which is why the UN already conspired to kick off websites they don't like), and on a bad day you might face problems like mandatory JavaScript, cookies, websoytes optimized for smartphones only, soycial media buttons, ads, trackers, paywalls, cookie walls, among other insanities.\
Make no mistake, this is all deliberate, they really want you to stop making your own websites and rely on just a handful soycial media platforms instead.\
And the so-called "resistance" will find themselves on just as centralized platforms all on Cuckflare's MITM botnet, and Cuckflare is a CIA honeypot.

Meanwhile, the darknet doesn't have any of these problems.\
They might have all the "bad day" stuff I mentioned above, but none of the stuff that can get you kicked off, maybe except if you're facing a power outage, but no big deal, you can still get your server back online with all the contents on it even after many months like you might have seen with this very website throughout the entirety of this year's summer.

All you need is an old computer you used to use as a daily driver with an ethernet port, a stable and sane OS (I recommend either Devuan or OpenBSD for servers), and at the very least some basic HTML, CSS, and RSS/Atom skills.\
Maybe you want to set up something like a mail server, XMPP server, IRC server, newsgroup server, or whatnot on that same machine that's accessible over the darknet only, but let's focus on just websites first.\
Install the OS, install nginx, tor, and i2pd, keep these fuckers up to date, and make something in HTML and CSS.\
You don't need to make something fancy, and you absolutely don't want to make a spaceship, even something as simple as a black background with white letters and just links (instead of buttons) is enough, as long as the content is worth reading.\
All this so-called "modern way of making websoytes" was deliberately designed to make you think that making your own website is an absolute pain in the ass, and thus you're better off just creating a Fakebook account and a JewTube channel, but you really don't have to make "modern" websoytes at all in order to let people know what you have to say.\
In fact, making your own website is so easy, even your grandma can do it, and perhaps she might change her pronouns from "she/her" to "anonymous/hacker" if she'd make her secret recipes in pure HTML and CSS.

Alright Ryo-kun, that's all nice and well, but how about content distribution?\
How do I let people know I posted something on my own website without soycial media?\
This is where RSS or Atom comes into play.\
We nerds used to use RSS feeds all the time until the normies started flooding themselves into the internet space, and ~~forces all of us~~ decided we should use soycial media instead.\
You can either make it manually or automatically, though if you make HTML and CSS by hand, you will likely have to make RSS and Atom by hand as well.\
Just like how you can configure web browsers to go over Tor or I2P, you can configure your RSS reader to go over Tor or I2P, and if not, you can just prefix them with proxychains.

But Ryo-kun, how about comments?\
I want to communicate with my audience!\
You could add some bits of PHP or JavaScript and MySQL to the mix once you're more comfortable running a static website, it can be easily done in just a few lines of code (if you're not using any frameworks at all that is, because if you do it'll takes billions of lines of code before you even start developing anything at all).\
Alternatively, and for the purpose of this blog, we could set up an XMPP or IRC server for instant messaging, or a newsgroup server which is what we used to use before forums (and now they've kind of been taken over by pirates), or a mailing list, so you can just use whatever email address you already have.\
Just like a static website in HTML and little bits of CSS, none of these should take up lots of space, and since they're all self hostable, none of these can be censored.

Nice and everything, but why should we self host?\
Why can't I just pay some ultra rich investor to create platforms for me?\
Well, just look at how it went with Gab, MeWe, Minds, Locals, BITCHute, Opussy, Rumble, BrandNewTube, GETTR, Parler, and the list goes on and on.\
Self hosting is really the only true way to go.\
It also solves the whole left-right (which is a scam) infighting, because the authoritarians/communists/ancoms/globalists/left have their own spaces, libertarians/anarchists/ancaps/right have their own spaces, capitalists/boomers/religious cultists/patriots have their own, soycialists/nationalists/(neo)nazi's/semi-commies have their own, apolitical people who just want to be left the fuck alone have their own etc.\
This is literally how the internet used to be, and we had world peace in the online realm.

Centralization is the problem, decentralization and federation is the solution, and blockchain is the meme for the tech illiterate.\
Authority is the cancer, anarchy is the cure.\
YOU are the power!
