Recent events have made a lot of things clear, but an item they’ve made primarily clear is that the current model of social networking is highly centralized and doomed to fail if you mean to use it in the pursuit of freedom. I mean, most of us already knew that, but to the average person, they never thought it would get this bad. With most major social media companies banning Trump and Amazon terminating its contract with Parler, the need for an alternative has been highlighted to people who never thought they would need one. A real alternative.

Part of the problem is highlighted by the termination of Parler’s hosting, and it’s a problem that I’ve gone over many times, but it bears repeating.

Centralization is the enemy of freedom.

The more isolated control is in the hands of small groups of people, and the less power is in the hands of the common person, the easier it is to completely silence people, and worse. The fact is, a lot of these alleged “free speech” platforms were anything but, and have always had a core vulnerability. As long as they’re run by a central authority, that central authority can decide what content is on it. In the case of Parler, not only did a central authority control the rules of the platform, which entailed regularly ban people for “obscenity”, while allowing racism, fascism, and other forms of bigotry, but they relied on Amazon to host their content. It’s absolutely hilarious to me that an alternative to big tech relied on big tech to exist, and even funnier that when big tech pulled the plug, these liars doubled down, and claimed that it was censorship. If they weren’t liars, they would have admitted that they made a serious mistake by trusting big tech to host their big tech alternative. They would have said that the centralized model is not effective at preventing the takedown of content. But they weren’t interested in honesty, they were interested in playing the victim, so that they could potentially get their platform back up and running.

For people not interested in playing the victim and actually interested in freedom, and specifically freedom of expression, there are many options available to people in terms of decentralized models of social media. When I brought up the fact that Parler are a lazy pack of disingenuous liars, I got a lot of pushback; especially since I highlighted the fact that the whole site was about 60 terabytes and quipped that I could host it in my bedroom. People didn’t believe me, at least people who don’t understand how the modern Internet works.

So, I thought I’d write up this short article on how to take part in the decentralized Internet, from the comfort of your own home. The fact is, it isn’t that difficult and doesn’t even require that much technical knowhow. The hardware specifications are also simple and even on a pretty limited budget, you too Kenn help build a freer future for speech.

A common objection to my criticisms was to inform me that while storage might be simple, bandwidth is not. In order to get an idea of what I’m talking about, it would be good to start off with a great example of the decentralized Internet at work.

Torrenting, a concept that has been around for decades, is a method by which a huge amount of data can be transferred seamlessly with low bandwidth requirements by a variety of people all at once. Basically, a ton of computers all have the same files stored on them. They each serve small pieces of the files rather than the full file all at once, which makes the transfer of said file more private, faster, and much lower bandwidth. The amount of machines serving the file at a given time determines the speed, as well as the proximity to the recipient, and the amount of servers in between; which means that if a dedicated group of people wanted a file to be permanently available, all they would have to do is host and take part in the torrent, or “seed” it.

This has been used for piracy and gotten a reputation for being the chosen method of Pirates, which has given it a bad reputation, but IP is a bunk concept anyway, and torrenting has so much more utility than simple piracy. This is why many official sites encourage torrenting of files rather than hosting the files on their own servers, which frees up their own bandwidths, and encourages the files to be shared in a democratized fashion.

But for anyone who’s read my article on alternative social media, you know that there’s already a social media protocol built on this particular method of information distribution called Zeronet. It literally runs entire websites via torrent, meaning that if a site is valuable enough, people will keep it up on their own computers, and download the entire thing, in order to ensure that they can always access it. Not only that, but Bittorrent has made noises about actually starting a social network on the torrent protocol, which I’m excited about the idea of, and will discuss further when I have more information.

However, bittorrent already owns the popular live streaming site Dlive, after acquiring it in October last year, and after having worked Dlive with the bittorrent ecosystem for nearly a year. And this is streaming video we’re talking about here, not text and images, the only thing Parler allowed; which means effectively, the infrastructure for Dlive already proves that all other social media is possible with a low bandwidth, distributed, and censorship-resistant, framework. Hosting a node for these sorts of things is not only not very difficult, but very doable in a variety of applications. It was so good, that it became PewDiePie’s preferred streaming platform for a long time, not too long ago. If even he can support it, I don’t know why more people don’t talk about this kind of social media infrastructure, but it’s a shame.

That’s not the only kind of distributed social network, though, and not to beat a dead horse about this, but when I talked about the blockchain and how it effectively prevents censorship, on a broad based scale, while allowing for both incentives and relatively unregulated speech, a lot of people didn’t seem to understand that this operates in a similar way to torrenting and has low bandwidth as well.

As long as you have the storage space necessary to host a node for a blockchain-based social media application, you too can be a part of the solution in terms of the free speech revolution that could be possible through this framework. It’s not that resource intensive, and most people could do this from their bedroom, much like my social media post which upset a significant amount of people delineated. As long as you can store a copy of the blockchain, in the same way that you would need to store a copy of the files which you torrent, you can help prevent social media censorship, and keep content alive.

The problem is, places like Parler weren’t interested in that, because they wanted to be able to easily remove content from their site. They were always censorious from the beginning, so the idea of a trustless, indelible record bothered them. It’s hard to delete a user with the word “tits” in their username if you don’t have control over their account, and it’s hard to remove their posts which make fun of your name by calling you “Bongina” if it’s a permanent block in the blockchain.

If people actually care about censorship, and want it prevented, however, they will take the insults, and the content with which they disagree, in exchange for the ability to speak freely, and help the world do the same. But that would involve not reskinning WordPress, and making it less useful, by removing most posting functionality, and limiting characters, media, and more, all in the name of looking like you built a site, when you did anything but.

Take, for example, Pocketnet. Got a 4 core CPU, 4GB RAM, 10GB free disk space, and at least a 1Mbps internet connection? You can get paid to help host a node, in a token that is exchangeable on multiple exchanges for fiat currency.

Pocketnet allows the same kind of text and image posts that parlor did, only with more functionality, and full on blogging capability. They’re also about to introduce videos to their service. When videos are introduced, the storage requirements will probably increase, but the point is that there was already a free speech website that was better than Parler. And in the case of this website, storing it and running it from your bedroom is not only possible, but easy, and not resource intensive at all. When they add video, it will be similar in terms of requirements to Lbry.

But while we’re talking about Lbry, let’s keep the conversation going.

First off, I think this is a good time to remind everyone that I I’m in the process of committing all articles on this site to audio form so that they can be listened to instead of read, making it easier to absorb in a variety of contexts, and allowing visually impaired people to also engage with it. If you appreciate what I’m doing, feel free to donate some cryptos. The more y’all support us, the more content we can put out, and the more you can hear my “Allegedly OK™” voice in your ears.

But we chose to host it on Lbry, because that way, if this site is ever taken down or censored for any reason, they won’t be able to remove our message from the Internet entirely without censoring the whole Lbry platform as well. Because of the way the site works, information is stored indelibly, with the blockchain record of storage locations and a torrent-like system of distribution and preservation.

I spoke with the official account on Twitter (on my rebel account), and had a great conversation about how scalable this system is, as well as how easy it is to help it from the comfort of your home. Also, since it’s open source, it has a growing community of developers devoting time and energy to resources to make it easier to use and support. The person I talked to did say bandwidth might be a concern if a resource was under extreme demand and there were no peers in the local area. I responded to that with the idea that if 50%+ of YouTube’s userbase transferred over because they cared enough about free speech, that would be a self-correcting problem. Then there would be more peers in your local area, and less to be concerned about in that regard.

And that highlights the key issue here. It’s not the infrastructure itself that’s the problem. It’s participation. The software isn’t what makes the challenge. The challenge arises from getting enough people to use it that its utility is maxed. This is the same with every other service I’ve discussed, and all the other services which I brought up in my other articles about alternative tech.

See, the way Lbry works is by storing small pieces of information called blobs in your local storage, and helping you seed those, so that other peers can download them, and participate as well. It’s basically automated targeting, and the more people use the network, the more people are helping the torrent. Just like normal torrents, it has very low bandwidth requirements the more people are hosting a file.

The issue, then, really does become whether or not you’re willing to allocate some storage space and a tiny amount of bandwidth to helping preserve the messages of those you claim you want to support, or whether you’ll be allegedly upset when they are censored, because of your big tech monopolies that you chose to support instead. And even though I’ve never run a server farm on the scale of Amazon, I can still confidently say that I have the wherewithal right now to participate in this segment of the information economy immediately. I won’t do it, because I use my PC for too many other things, which is why I’m waiting for enough income to afford a RAID server, so that I can confidently do this sort of thing, and also back up all the evil things I do.

Ultimately, I would love to be part of the solution, instead of just constantly supporting the problem by telling people to subscribe to me on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever other hell hole I happen upon. I’m driven to do better, and instead of waiting for either a Corporation or its statist father figure to pretend to solve the problem for me by making a bunch of laws and regulations, or waiting for them to betray the public interest like they always do, which is much more likely, by censoring yet more people who run counter to their narrative, I would rather support the solutions that free people now. And it really isn’t that hard. anyone who thinks otherwise is never actually tried any of this stuff, and has no interest in trying, which is why most of them will spend a large amount of time condescending you, without actually looking into this stuff. This was my experience, and largely the grudge-ridden, spiteful reason I chose to write this. I told the folks at Lbry, basically, I’m being antagonistic to the sort of person who would say that running a distributed network takes high bandwidth. They were annoying me not too long ago, and I want to hit em’ where it hurts.

So, next time anyone acts like the people who ran that website have nowhere else to turn and were simply using what was available to them, and predictably censored by an evil big tech corporation, just remember that they are the ones who chose to be dishonest to begin with, claiming that they were offering a brand new website when it was really a reskin of WordPress, claiming to be an alternative to big tech while relying on big tech for core parts of their infrastructure.

They lied, and on such a massive scale that I would be surprised if there weren’t class action lawsuits directed toward them anytime now. With the unprecedented data breaching of such sensitive information, along with the patent lies which made people give that information to begin with, the fact that they’re still operating at all is what stunning. It’s also pretty hilarious that the only way they’re still operating is by highlighting certain thinkers the admins agree with, and allowing them to continue to post, while the rest of the people are locked out of the website experience. I don’t know how that’s working, because no hacker has found out yet. And they are not transparent or honest.

But those 2 problems are precisely why they were never the alternative to begin with, period; if you truly want freedom, don’t attempt to get it from a source where you have to guess whether you have it or not. Go with an open source, or at the very least decentralized platform, which allows you to be in more control of your data, and allows for the democratization of information on unprecedented scale.

We live in a weird Fusion of Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and 1984, exactly like Truthstream Media has said many times, ultimately, we also live in an era of unprecedented informational access, and as long as the elites continue to allow this long leash, we should use it to spread as much information against them as possible while we can, build up our numbers, and prepare for…Whatever is coming.

Because ultimately, whatever it is won’t be pretty, and if we can’t even organize an alternative social media application, we cannot weather the coming storm.

Batten down your hatches, and bunker up. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.