The genie is already out of the bottle for thirty years, and it's called the open web. Luckily I don't need half the world's population to agree upon and use something that already exists out there.
Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.
I absolutely love thew web. I wish I could get onboard with this sentiment. But, the web bitrots away, piece by piece year by year. Archive.org mercifully backstops against much of the loss. But its not enough.
And demanding everyone buy and own a domain name & figure out hosting seems unviable as requirements for the world's mass communication system.
The Bluesky PDS architecture is a lovely lovely modest & small iteration on the web, adds only a bit more. To make your vault of content still addressable, still a URL, but one tied to a cryptographic identifier. And to make the content all signed and secure.
You know why it's called the web? Because all the websites and webpages linking to each other form the shape of a web. I don't know what shape the internet is going to be, but the web is shaped like a web. Also tomorrow.
I love the web, but it is also clear that much of the internet is now a hub and spoke model. Client/server, in other words. The difficulty was always matching clients with different servers, and the centralised services never had to solve it.
I'm on HN for years now and what I slowly came to realize is that people here (maybe more than somewhere else, maybe not) like to spend time and energy explaining how stuff is, like it's still some sort of school test that gives one points for all the correct answers. Thereby easily forgetting what has been and still is, what works, what one can do about stuff in a positive way, what choices people have (instead of constantly pretending there is no choice, or someone else already chose for us), etc.
Even pointing out that people have a choice - with some work, yes, but only a little work - elicits some counter response that basically comes down to: no, you don't have a choice. I don't like that, and it also signals creative laziness.
P.S. Zoom out a little. The open web is also client/server (although peer-to-peer would be nice), that's not the point. We all need some infra, some trust, and a clear rule of law for the internet and the web to work. We just don't need big tech's view of 'social media' (there's nothing social about that) or platforms that present themselves as being an alternative as long as we have the perfect alternative - called the open web - being around for thirty years, battle tested and actively maintained by millions.
P.P.S. This is in reply to you, but read it as a general opinion, it's not a personal attack on anything you said.
Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.