Decentralising gopherspace

Auzymoto is the latest SDF phlogger to migrate to their own

server[1], to which I can only say "congratulations"! Auzymoto cites

a desire for control and certainty over the long term availability

of his content as motivations for the move, in addition to

apparently agreeing that the decentralisation of gopherspace is a

good thing in principle.

Certainly, decentralisation efforts seem to be picking up steam. I

have been thinking a little, again, about what an ideal scenario

might look like for the phlogosphere at large.

At one extreme of a continuum, we have literally every single phlog

contained on a single server. I don't think situation ever has

obtained in reality and I doubt it ever will. But the status quo

for many years has been pretty close to this, with SDF acting as a

kind of mega-node in the network. Certainly, we have been much

closer to this extreme than to the other extreme, which is

one-server-per-phlog.

I wonder about how desirable the opposite extreme is. This does seem

to be the natural limit of the currently brewing sea-change, with

people like Tomasino and Auzymoto setting up servers just for their

own use. On the one hand, this approach obviously grants each

individual phlogger the absolute maximum amount of control, and

minimises the possible impact of server/network outages, which are

very good things.

On the other hand, I don't think that, coming from SDF, any of these

people could deny that there is a certain magic associated with the

small communities that can form when several people make communal

use of a server. There is something to be said for it, even if it

doesn't scale endlessly. Of course, the one-server-per-phlog

approach also limits the accessibility of the phlogosphere to those

with the skills, time and inclination to run a server.

There seems to be a fairly strong parallel to the issue of Mastodon

instance size here. In both cases, I suspect a "middle path" will

often work quite nicely. I think servers with, say, 10 or 25

active users phlogging on a common theme could be a really nice

model. It adds some structure to the network and solves the issue of

content discovery to some degree, in that if you find an interesting

phlog you have automatically found a place where you can read stuff

on the same topic from other authors who, while not necessarily

endorsing everything the phlog you just read says, have at least

chosen to associate with the author. There would, of course, be

nothing stopping people who phlog on multiple subjects from having

phlogs at multiple servers like this, although that leads to

content discovery problems of a different kind, where you can't

automatically find everything that a single person has written

(unless they carefully interlink their phlogs).

We'll figure it out, I'm sure.

[1] gopher://auzymoto.net:70/0/glog/post0009gopher://auzymoto.net:70/0/glog/post