I’m one of the few volunteer contributors to Bonfire, and I would never dream of recommending Mozilla to use it. You have to reach out to people where they are at, not pick the tools based on prime principles. American platforms are blackmailing us by gatekeeping access to audiences, but it’s not like you can pretend most humans are reachable on microscopic federated platforms. Which btw is not the intended use case for bonfire.

And of course it loads content from Google! :( Well, it tried, because I block all that stuff, but how sad anyway. There are very few “independent” sites out there these days, all of them depend on third-parties, sometimes for a valid reason, but many others not.

Internet in 2005: “Don’t trust anything you read in the newspaper, watch on TV, or hear on the radio. The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2015: “You can now read the newspaper, watch TV, and listen to the radio on the Internet! The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2025: “AI gibberish”

The subset of human behavior includes predation. It’s in our DNA, whether it is in you or not. It’s this fact we can’t forget or become naive about.

Criminal culture is decentralized, neo-Nazis are decentralized, power is decentralized.

Decentralized doesn’t equal good. I mean, I agree, but also one should use things with the smallest possible effective difference between suggested main quality and “what if not”.

That’s also why I’ve become skeptical of encryption lately. If one of your group members is compromised, it’s all compromised, doesn’t matter with how many member keys you encrypt each message, one is enough. In Signal they do that to conceal who’s a member of which group, and that is, of course, a noble endeavor. But see the previous paragraph. Either you expect one thing or the other. Either you are in a public group and have to watch your opsec and words, or you are in some cryptic conclave among trusted brethren. Except the latter is never true. Fringe of psychology and tech, as all security.

It’s similar with decentralization. It’s just a trait. Whether you need it is defined by your goal.

In my opinion it’s good when it’s real. Say, for the goal of countering bad market-driven phenomena in the Internet, - yes, it’s a real solution and it’s good when it works. For the goal of countering authoritarianism and surveillance it’s not, because it doesn’t solve the problem, in such a situation they can block and prosecute whoever they want and they will, and decentralization won’t work by itself.

So, when it works. It works when it allows people making stuff to make money, and when that includes stuff making the whole system work. If such a decentralized set of tools had been already made, it would have already won by market means. Despite all the advertising bullshit, oligopoly and vendor locks.

A lot of these spaces are reading, writing and designing around so-called “anti-capture” protocols exactly to avoid that.

My thoughts exactly.