britone mwasaru

Decentralization sounds like a great idea. Technically, yes but it brings about a whole lot of issues. Back in the day computing was expensive and communicating meant running your own infrastructure. For communities they had to set up their own forum softwares and have some volunteer run the servers to host the forums.

We got into an era where there hasn’t been a need to run your own servers as infrastructure became cheaper to buy, social media became a thing, hosting platforms and many other developments. The advertisement business model made it easy for folks to connect and communicate as platforms sold their engagement to companies in the form of ads. Ads model means the platform need to understand the users and this obviously brought about a lot of privacy issues. 

For some this centralization is the problem. To some extent I agree with this argument since you cannot tell a privately owned company what to do and without regulation they don’t really need to listen to you. The easy solution is to say lets just decentralize. The issue with decentralization is we are heading back to a time when you need to have some technical experience to run social platforms. For a community to keep engaging or do some any over the internet thing they need to buy and maintain infrastructure.

Decentralization would mean a whole lot of non-technical folks will need to find learn or jump onto some server. Apart from inclusion there emerges digital security and surveillance issues. Running a server would mean you need to be technical plus also need to be able to maintain & regularly update it. This opens up a whole lot of people to government surveillance as it’s easy to not properly follow server security measures.

When you come from communities whose first access to the internet was Facebook you would understand how running own servers and asking folks to install apps or only use a browser to communicate would be difficult to sell.

The other issue is that not everyone can afford to get off platforms they have spent a lot of time building engagement and have curved an audience for themselves. For most it’s hard to take time learn something new especially when it’s a little technical. 

This post doesn’t mean I don’t support or think decentralization can be a solution to a number of issues but I think we need to think of social issues like inclusion & existing threats like growing government surveillance. Decentralization is a great first step fighting use of personal data to sell ads and censorship that’s becoming common among the big social media platforms. 

Image at the top is prototype of datacenter demoed by Ethio telecom during Internet Governance Forum in Ethiopia.